Reader Johnny Cat wrote in to ask about which Wikipedia entries have the highest incidences of false information in them. “I’m aware that almost everything there, from Applebee’s to Zorro, has errors every day,” he wrote, “but something in my gut tells me there are certain topics that just attract bad submitters.”
Johnny Cat—and you—will probably be as surprised as I was scrolling down Wikipedia’s List of Most Vandalized Pages, because there doesn’t seem to be any method to the madness of wiki vandalism as far subject matter is concerned. Among the victims of “exceptionally high vandalism” are the entries for Jack London, baseball, Halo 2, Harry Potter, piano, home improvement and buttocks. The commonality among some of the most vandalized entries seems to be that they’re recent major news events, topics that are currently, or have been, subjects of controversy, or entries that are simply popular and often read.
Back up. What is wiki vandalism in the first place?
Wikipedia defines it as any “addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia,” which can come in variety of flavors, such as…
Blanking: Removing all or significant parts of a page’s content without any reason, or replacing entire pages with nonsense.
Page creation: Creating new pages with the intent of malicious behavior, like blatant advertising pages, personal attack pages and hoaxes.
Page lengthening: Adding large amounts of bad-faith content in order to make the page’s load time abnormally long or even make it impossible to load without browser crashing.
Spam: Adding external links to non-notable or irrelevant sites or sites that have some relationship to the subject matter, but advertise or promote in the user’s interest.
Silly vandalism: Adding profanity, graffiti, random characters or other nonsense to entries or creating nonsensical and non-encyclopedic pages.
Image vandalism: Uploading shock images, inappropriately placing explicit images on pages, or using images in other disruptive ways.
Once the damage is done, how long does it take to fix?
In the interest of science, Wikipedia user Colonel Chaos vandalized featured articles, the entries that are considered the cream of the Wikipedia crop. Since Wikipedia employs software created to help find easy-to-spot vandalism (like “Your mom!” or “POOP!!!!”), the Colonel engaged in slightly more complex vandalism of three types: Complete Nonsense, where passages of completely irrelevant prose were inserted into articles; Grave Factual Accuracy, where material was changed or inserted in a way that it would be obvious to the average reader or editor of Wikipedia that the material was untrue (e.g. That Martin Sheen discovered hydrochloric acid by mixing potatoes with salt and invented Agent Orange for the purpose of dissolving gold); and Factual Inaccuracy, where articles were changed slightly so a reader would need some knowledge of the topic in order to spot the inaccuracy (e.g. the article on Norman Borlaug was changed from “Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India” to “Between 1968 and 1975, wheat yields nearly tripled in Pakistan and India.”
The average response time on these changes were 11.5 hours for Complete Nonsense, 9.25 hours for Grave Inaccuracy and 57.4 minutes for Factual Inaccuracy. Colonel Chaos notes that for featured articles, which rotate on Wikipedia’s main page and are heavily viewed, a reversion time of 10 minutes would be more appropriate.
Here are some highlights from the study:
| Article | Elapsed Time between vandalism and reversion |
| Medal of Honor | 1 Minute |
| Hydrochloric Acid | 14 hours 16 minutes (Edited by an automated bot in between Colonel Chaos’ edit and the revert). |
| Second Crusade | 42 hours 38 minutes (According to Colonel Chaos, “This one suffered another incident of vandalism and was reverted to my version before my modifications were corrected. Honestly, how long does it take to figure out that Gregory Peck, Bill Cosby, and Harry Potter didn’t lead the Second Crusade and that Paul Revere wasn’t involved?) |
Is there any way to stop this madness?
Well, there was the plan to simply let vandals run amok on the entry for chickens. By sacrificing this article—”Dudes already know about chickens. Ladies also already know about chickens. Does an encyclopedia really need an article about nature’s tastiest birds?”—it was hoped that the rest of Wikipedia would be spared. The plan, like the bird, never really got off the ground.
Then there’s WikiScanner, created by Daniel Erenrich and Virgil Griffith, which allows users to trace the source of anonymous edits to Wikipedia entries and by using IP address of the anonymous user (which Wikipedia logs) to identify the owner of the computer network from which the edits were made. In the past, the tool has exposed insiders at Diebold Election Systems, Exxon and the CIA covertly deleting or changing information that was unflattering to their organizations. If you can’t stop a vandal, you can at least pull back the curtain of anonymity.
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Comments (16)
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Wikipedia is a good place to start, but because it is user-submitted there is always a possibility of inaccuracies or — as shown by this article — outright lies.
So if you really want more information about a given topic, whether it’s chickens or chihuahuas, you need to do a little more research. And for that, Google is your friend. Dogpile (http: http://www.dogpile.com) ain’t bad, either.
-”BB”-
posted by Bicycle Bill on 9-1-2010 at 3:44 pm
I remember Alabama and Auburn entries (big football rivals in AL) being vandalized. Entries would get modified along the lines of “Auburn is known for losing football games in a regular basis to in-state rival, Alabama.”
It was found to be students doing the work :)
posted by Mamabug on 9-1-2010 at 3:58 pm
This reminds me of the episode of 30 Rock where the writers vandalize the Wikipedia page on Janis Joplin to sabotage Jenna’s research for her low-budget biopic. Her frustration when she finally learns that Joplin was not afraid of toilets and and did not power-walk everywhere left me in stitches!
posted by Marty on 9-1-2010 at 4:03 pm
I would rather read about Paul Revere and the Crusades, than the CIA and Exxon covering up their shame.
posted by Bakedpotatoes on 9-1-2010 at 5:10 pm
This is interesting as a short term study, but after a couple of days this kind of thing won’t be corrected. I used to sabotage wikipedia entries while teaching information literacy classes to college freshman, and pretty much all of those entries still contain blatant factual inaccuracies. I mean, yeah, wikipedia is great, but please don’t quote me information from it. And if you do, tell me it’s from somewhere else.
posted by Benn on 9-1-2010 at 5:28 pm
Once, I was looking at the Wikipedia entry for gas stoves, as I was trying to figure out how to do a simple fix on mine. The entry said that Britney Spears invented the gas stove. Made me laugh all day!
posted by Kellie on 9-1-2010 at 5:57 pm
I’m fascinated by the idea that just by adding information to a Wikipedia page that you can essentially create knowledge. As a joke after a trip to Vegas, my husband added a few lines to the Wikipedia article on craps to include a reference to the “Mellenberg roll,” which he defined as a craps roll that doesn’t hit the other side of the table (named after a friend who wasn’t the best craps shooter). Not only has the information remained in Wikipedia after 3 years, it’s actually been referenced by so many other online gambling sites that it’s become “truth.” Ironically, the source referenced in the Wikipedia article is a source that actually took the info from the Wikipedia article in the first place! The link to my article is in my name.
On one hand, it worries me that people take Wikipedia at face value (I’ll admit it’s the first place I go when I’m looking for information!). But on the other hand, it really is an amazing example of the social construction of knowledge – something “is” because a group of people got together (virtually, in this case) an agreed that it’s so (or at least, didn’t disagree). What would Aristotle think?
posted by Lynley on 9-1-2010 at 8:23 pm
@ Marty: “And Janis Joplin didn’t eat cats…ALF ate cats.”
That episode was hilarious!
posted by Krie on 9-1-2010 at 9:02 pm
I’m surprised… Because I’ve made an edit before on a rather obscure article, and it was true but I forgot to add a source, and it was deleted within 5 minutes.
posted by Alex on 9-1-2010 at 10:17 pm
“Reader Johnny Cat wrote in to ask about which Wikipedia entries have the highest incidences of false information in them”
A huge number of Wikipedia entries have false information that have nothing to do with outside vandalism. The are many pages on global warming or politics that will have facts removed from them by the editors after a few hours.
posted by Phil on 9-2-2010 at 7:02 am
I think that Wikipedia is a good source for general every day information, but you have to take everything with a grain of salt because it may not be correct.
I am also a big supporter of many university’s policy that if you submit a paper with Wikipedia as a source you get an automatic “F”
posted by Suz on 9-2-2010 at 8:46 am
For the longest time I had Amy Tan listed as the writer of “The Replacement Killers” was finally deleted after 2 years with a tag of “source?”
posted by Kevin on 9-2-2010 at 9:10 am
The only time I’ve seen a fact I knew for sure was wrong was when I was thinking about grade school memories and realized I’d forgotten how to play Four Square. The Wikipedia article had something really odd in it, like Four Square had been banned in 30 states after it was linked to witchcraft, or something like that.
Wikipedia’s great for pop culture fact-gathering, but I never assume every single thing it tells me is true!
posted by grobanite33 on 9-2-2010 at 12:07 pm
Steven Colbert told his fans to write that African Elephants were over populated and needed to be hunted down. i don’t know how long it took to be put right.
posted by Fabian on 9-2-2010 at 1:50 pm
I once saw an article about a Mortal Kombat game (since merged with another) that talked about a character created but not used for the game, because the programmers didn’t have time to finish him. Turning the words “finish him” to all caps and adding an exclamation mark is the only example of Wikipedia vandalism I’ve committed.
posted by Stefan on 9-2-2010 at 3:58 pm
Anyone vandalising Wikipedia because it is possible to vandalise it doesn’t get the idea behind it. Still you’ll use it to see if you saw that Seinfeld episode or not.
posted by JBJ on 9-2-2010 at 9:26 pm