4 ms·

There was a similar scandal for the Scots wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedi

There was a similar scandal for the Scots wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-...

oefrha 4y ago
I don’t see any similarity between the scandals beyond the surface level one person generating a lot of content on Wikipedia that was later reversed. Your linked article is about some teenager putting up mistranslated garbage. That’s very boring vandalism, notable only due to its scale. TFA is about someone creating a vast collection of plausible-sounding history out of thin air, which is fascinating and arguably more damaging for Wikipedia.
- thih9 4y ago
  In both cases people pretended to be experts (history / scots), it worked and large amount of inappropriate articles stayed public a long time.
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  The Scots Wikipedia issue isn't straightforward at all. For one, considering the sheer effort spent in 170 000 edits over a decade, it's quite possible that the editor was acting in severely misguided good faith. More importantly, it raised questions about the utility and proceedings of Wikimedia sites with low traffic; a substantial discussion took place in an RFC[0] that included proposed audits to prevent future incidents, but nothing really went through other than increased attention to the long-existing Small-Wiki Monitoring Team. And the off-wiki effects...poisoned datasets and damage to the language itself! Perhaps proposals from the RFC will be renewed in light of this, though it's not the same situation as the Chinese Wikipedia isn't really small. It's known for questionable circumstances regarding adminship and other user behaviour, though, and is generally quite insular. So, unsurprising that this story hasn't received much attention outside of Chinese Wikipedia or news. On-wiki, the only pages for it currently are that on zhwiki and a corresponding page on English Wikipedia with a brief summary.[1] Also, enwiki's own newspaper has a more informed article on the Scots incident,[2] also with some discussion (there's also an HN post). By the way, I remember an article or Wikipedia page about how journalism about Wikipedia persistently lacks nuance or understanding of its customs (basically a community-wide Gell-Mann amnesia effect), but can't find it now...anyone happen to just know it? [0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Large_scale_language_inaccuracies_on_the_Scots_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Large_s... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fabricated_articles_and_hoaxes_of_Russia_in_2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fabricated_articles_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2020-08-30/News_and_notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > and damage to the language itself! What could this mean? Sometimes people do talk about the health of a language, but that almost exclusively refers to the number of living speakers.
    - akolbe 4y ago
      Being freely licensed, the Wikipedia corpus is widely used as input for AI tools such as machine translation. https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/
      - thaumasiotes 4y ago
        How does that hurt the language itself? What would it mean for the language to be hurt?
        PeterisP 4y ago
        Any people wanting to learn the language using these resources (e.g. learning more Scots from the Scots wikipedia) would mean that they learn the altered/false/different language instead of the actual language, and afterward that changes how the actual language is used in practice, propagating the misconceptions onwards and degrading the language. In a similar way, if some people online are using they/their/they're interchangeably, and then other people (who are learning the language) learn that they are interchangeable and start using them this way, then English gets hurt by being altered in this undesired way. Some changes to language are considered desirable (e.g. introduction of new terminology for new concepts, or restructuring either as a natural process or top-down reforms that makes it more clear and thus more useful for communication) and some are not (ones that increase confusion such as the they/their/they're example above), and the latter ones are considered to hurt the language.
        thaumasiotes 4y ago
        > Some changes to language are considered desirable (e.g. introduction of new terminology for new concepts, or restructuring either as a natural process The problem is that what you describe in your first paragraph: > Any people wanting to learn the language using these resources (e.g. learning more Scots from the Scots wikipedia) would mean that they learn the altered/false/different language instead of the actual language, and afterward that changes how the actual language is used in practice is just a description of how languages change as a natural process. It's not different in any way. Concluding that in this case it is "damage" and "bad" would require you to conclude that all natural language change is also "damage" and "bad", which is admittedly a popular viewpoint. But it's one you're trying to disavow.
- rob74 4y ago
  Even worse (or better, depending on how you look at it), she interconnected her made-up history with historical places and persons - e.g. the principality of Tver did exist, so it's probably hard to tell which of the details about it are fact and which are fiction. That's almost Dan Brown-level stuff...
- xdennis 4y ago
  > I don’t see any similarity between the scandals beyond the surface level one person generating a lot of content on Wikipedia that was later reversed. That's the similarity. It's like saying you don't see any similarity between Maradona and Messi, other than both of them being very successful Argentinian players.

oefrha 4y ago

I don’t see any similarity between the scandals beyond the surface level one person generating a lot of content on Wikipedia that was later reversed. Your linked article is about some teenager putting up mistranslated garbage. That’s very boring vandalism, notable only due to its scale. TFA is about someone creating a vast collection of plausible-sounding history out of thin air, which is fascinating and arguably more damaging for Wikipedia.

thih9 4y ago
In both cases people pretended to be experts (history / scots), it worked and large amount of inappropriate articles stayed public a long time.
mgdlbp 4y ago
The Scots Wikipedia issue isn't straightforward at all. For one, considering the sheer effort spent in 170 000 edits over a decade, it's quite possible that the editor was acting in severely misguided good faith. More importantly, it raised questions about the utility and proceedings of Wikimedia sites with low traffic; a substantial discussion took place in an RFC[0] that included proposed audits to prevent future incidents, but nothing really went through other than increased attention to the long-existing Small-Wiki Monitoring Team. And the off-wiki effects...poisoned datasets and damage to the language itself! Perhaps proposals from the RFC will be renewed in light of this, though it's not the same situation as the Chinese Wikipedia isn't really small. It's known for questionable circumstances regarding adminship and other user behaviour, though, and is generally quite insular. So, unsurprising that this story hasn't received much attention outside of Chinese Wikipedia or news. On-wiki, the only pages for it currently are that on zhwiki and a corresponding page on English Wikipedia with a brief summary.[1] Also, enwiki's own newspaper has a more informed article on the Scots incident,[2] also with some discussion (there's also an HN post). By the way, I remember an article or Wikipedia page about how journalism about Wikipedia persistently lacks nuance or understanding of its customs (basically a community-wide Gell-Mann amnesia effect), but can't find it now...anyone happen to just know it? [0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Large_scale_language_inaccuracies_on_the_Scots_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Large_s... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fabricated_articles_and_hoaxes_of_Russia_in_2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fabricated_articles_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2020-08-30/News_and_notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > and damage to the language itself! What could this mean? Sometimes people do talk about the health of a language, but that almost exclusively refers to the number of living speakers.
  - akolbe 4y ago
    Being freely licensed, the Wikipedia corpus is widely used as input for AI tools such as machine translation. https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      How does that hurt the language itself? What would it mean for the language to be hurt?
      - PeterisP 4y ago
        Any people wanting to learn the language using these resources (e.g. learning more Scots from the Scots wikipedia) would mean that they learn the altered/false/different language instead of the actual language, and afterward that changes how the actual language is used in practice, propagating the misconceptions onwards and degrading the language. In a similar way, if some people online are using they/their/they're interchangeably, and then other people (who are learning the language) learn that they are interchangeable and start using them this way, then English gets hurt by being altered in this undesired way. Some changes to language are considered desirable (e.g. introduction of new terminology for new concepts, or restructuring either as a natural process or top-down reforms that makes it more clear and thus more useful for communication) and some are not (ones that increase confusion such as the they/their/they're example above), and the latter ones are considered to hurt the language.
        thaumasiotes 4y ago
        > Some changes to language are considered desirable (e.g. introduction of new terminology for new concepts, or restructuring either as a natural process The problem is that what you describe in your first paragraph: > Any people wanting to learn the language using these resources (e.g. learning more Scots from the Scots wikipedia) would mean that they learn the altered/false/different language instead of the actual language, and afterward that changes how the actual language is used in practice is just a description of how languages change as a natural process. It's not different in any way. Concluding that in this case it is "damage" and "bad" would require you to conclude that all natural language change is also "damage" and "bad", which is admittedly a popular viewpoint. But it's one you're trying to disavow.
rob74 4y ago
Even worse (or better, depending on how you look at it), she interconnected her made-up history with historical places and persons - e.g. the principality of Tver did exist, so it's probably hard to tell which of the details about it are fact and which are fiction. That's almost Dan Brown-level stuff...
xdennis 4y ago
> I don’t see any similarity between the scandals beyond the surface level one person generating a lot of content on Wikipedia that was later reversed. That's the similarity. It's like saying you don't see any similarity between Maradona and Messi, other than both of them being very successful Argentinian players.