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I'm ashamed to admit in my youth I created a fake Wikipedia page in a couple hours (between 3 and 5AM) that lasted for months before a friend of mine accidenta
by jvrossb 14y ago
I'm ashamed to admit in my youth I created a fake Wikipedia page in a couple hours (between 3 and 5AM) that lasted for months before a friend of mine accidentally exposed it as fake by being silly in the talk section.
It was flagged as dubious because the date that the fictional piece the fictional composer I created had supposedly been performed the day of a new Pope's election didn't match the date on that Pope's wikipedia article.
Turns out we had the right date and the Pope's wikipedia article the wrong one. So our hoax ended up resulting in another article being corrected. From then on, anyone who looked at the talk page saw that someone had already flagged the page as dubious but that it had been resolved in our favour. This gave the hoax quite a bit of credibility. Made me realize how easy it is to create convincing hoaxes.
- rangibaby 14y agoOr the person who had an extra name added by a Wikipedia editor, which was then copied by mainstream media. The hoaxers then used that as a citation, creating "truth". Wow!
- DanBC 14y agoWell, wikipedia doesn't talk about truth, but about verifiability. That's a bit of a problem because most people (even most wp editors) don't get the difference. Certainly people visiting wp expect it to be both truthful and verifiable.
- pbhjpbhj 14y agoWell "verifiability" means the ability to show that it is true. Something verifiable is demonstrably true. WP verifiability means something different. 'being cited as true by a trusted source' seems close but you can't blame users for Wikipedia's misuse of a word. Of course that just shifts the focus to what is a trusted source ... presumably the answer is one that is true ... I can prove it too ... http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verify http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verify [lol!].