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Wikpedia vandalism experiment

Chris perpetrated what I'd call a grey-hat hack against Wikipedia — inserting some incorrect information to see what would happen. Rusty calls it vandalism. The specific change was an assertion that there is a colony of Australian Gannets at ANU, and they eat pizza. I removed it. (Sorry, Chris.) It was slightly funny, which is why I left it there for a week after I originally saw it.

So Chris proved that incorrect information can persist in Wikipedia for a matter of a few weeks, even when the page is reviewed by some people. OK, so you can't believe everything you read on the Internet — that's hardly news.

I'm sure there are errors in Wikipedia. There are probably errors in non-free encyclopedias too, though perhaps proportionally less. On the other hand, traditional encyclopedias move much more slowly and can't cover current events to the same extent. If they tried to do that, their error rate might increase.

I suspect the influx of accurate content willl dilute the errors over time. Errors are removed in a kind of stochastic process — any particular error may persist for days or months, but eventually they go. Accurate content increases monotonically — it's easy to detect and revert vandalistic deletion. (This is a key advantage of Wikipedia over the web as a whole: if a page has just one error or inaccuracy you don't need to write a whole new page.) So I expect the fraction of errors to slowly decrease.

If you want reliable information then cross-checking Wikipedia with a traditional encyclopedia and other materials will probably give better results than any source alone.

I don't think marking articles as "reviewed" or "draft" would really fix it. A critical reader can get a much better sense of reliability from cross-referencing, looking at the article history and Talk page, etc. (Anyhow, how can you trust the "reviewed" tag?) As Douglas Adams pointed out, humans are cunningly designed to do trust calculations in firmware.

posted Tue 5 Oct 2004 in /software/wikipedia | link

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