
The story behind Jar’Edo Wens, the longest-running hoax in Wikipedia history - halfimmortal
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/04/15/the-great-wikipedia-hoax/
======
duggan
I have a friend who, years ago, used to go about inserting subtly absurd
photos into Wikipedia articles.

One that I recall was for the Refrigerator entry, which he seemingly
innocently updated with a "better quality photo" of his own fridge.

If you examined the photo you'd spot that there was a guitar on one of the
shelves[1]

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Refrigerator&oldid...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Refrigerator&oldid=130709805)

~~~
bbrian
I edited Winners Don't Use Drugs to say See also: Michael Phelps.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Winners_Don%27t_Us...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Winners_Don%27t_Use_Drugs&oldid=268636385)

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notahacker
The article referred to him being "name dropped into books". I wondered if the
article meant "scraped into the awful spambooks that sell Wikipedia content
without the copyright notices", but was amused to find out it actually made it
into a list of abandoned deities compiled by a serious-sounding professor of
philosophy for a book on atheism [http://internet.gawker.com/how-one-man-made-
himself-into-an-...](http://internet.gawker.com/how-one-man-made-himself-into-
an-aboriginal-god-with-
wi-1692426415?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_facebook&utm_source=gawker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow)

Considering the article was an unsourced stub that seems to have owed its
longevity to the fact nobody noticed its existence, that's some impressively
_comprehensive_ sloppy research.

------
wpietri
I find it a little weird to see Gregory Kohs listed generically as "a
prominent Wikipedia critic". In 2007 he tried to start a business where he'd
get paid to put articles in Wikipedia:

[http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16793247/ns/technology_and_science...](http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16793247/ns/technology_and_science-
tech_and_gadgets/t/idea-paid-entries-roils-wikipedia/)

At the time it was seen as an outrage (in my view correctly so) and promptly
banned. Wikipedia has a clear conflict-of-interest policy [1] for good reason.
Their most valuable asset is reader trust, and Wikipedia, for all its flaws,
has done a reasonably good job of keeping it from being overrun by
marketroids.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest)

~~~
new1234567
What about paying for high-quality, fact-checked journalism and writing on
wikipedia? Seems like that could have a positive impact. ?

~~~
wpietri
I think paying for writing would be a giant mistake. There's a big
psychological difference between working for intrinsic rewards and extrinsic
rewards; the former gets you much better work. There's also a huge problem
with paying some people and not others; my guess is a lot of volunteers would
quit immediately if other people were getting paid for similar work.

------
evolve2k
Australia is made up of hundreds of indigenous lands and language groups many
of which carry sacred knowledge not shared with the broader public. So it's
not totally surprising that this hoax survived as long as it did.

To give you a fascinating extent to how varied indigenous lannguage groups of
Australia are check out this map. We're not talking dialects/accents here,
we're talking unique languages where I've be told in many cases people share
very little traditionally language except for possibly some similarities with
their direct neighbouring lands.

[http://www.abc.net.au/indigenous/map/](http://www.abc.net.au/indigenous/map/)

~~~
new299
And they're even eventing new languages!
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/science/linguist-finds-
a-l...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/science/linguist-finds-a-language-
in-its-infancy.html)

------
JackFr
Can they really not know who did it? I would start by asking people named
Jared Owens.

~~~
gpvos
Look him up in the Melbourne phone book, or ask around in writers' circles.

------
MrZongle2
The greatest trick Jar'Edo Wens ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't
exist.

------
sparkzilla
The situation will only get worse as the number of editors declines, leading
to a death spiral where hoaxes, bias and inaccuracy make readers and editors
lose faith in the project. The other problem (as noted below) is that it is
almost impossible to add new or updated information. Generally, observers
blame the community, but, in fact most of the site's problems are symptoms of
poor software design. I write more about these problems here:
[http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-
sins/](http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/)

------
MollyR
This is both funny and extremely frightening. Between this and some links from
other HN users, I feel like wikipedia is rapidly losing credibility. Does
anyone have recommendations for any alternatives ?

Personal Anecdote: I also remember the time, one of my friends in college told
me that she purposely added misinformation to Wikipedia the night before a big
test to lower the curve.

That was also the moment I was glad I'm didn't do premed in college, those
kids were hyper-competitive and unethical.

------
ExpiredLink
>> _Anyone can edit Wikipedia, of course_

That's not true any more, of course.

~~~
x1798DE
I'm tempted to write "[citation needed]", but to avoid snarkiness, I'll
rephrase as: What are you talking about?

~~~
Nursie
It's very difficult to get anything accepted now.

A friend of mine is a published author. Not massively famous or anything, but
he's got a series of four books out, published by an actual publishing house
and available to buy across the UK in Waterstones and other physical stores
(i.e. not self-published or internet-only).

His page was nominated for deletion a few years ago, and despite protest was
deleted. About a year ago I thought I might have another go so another friend
and I tried (as a first step) adding a page for the publisher. They've
published quite a few books now, and some have been nominated for some quite
prestigious literary awards. Not unreasonable one would think.

Within minutes we had someone come along and nominate the page for summary
deletion. This person didn't know anything about UK literature, or even what
the Booker Prize was, but was very eager to get rid of the page regardless. I
looked into what their motivation might be and it seems they were part of a
team that effectively exists to get rid of new pages as fast as possible, for
any reason they can come up with. They get notified when a new page is made
and try to kill it, basically.

Unless you are familiar with all the arcana of wikipedia (my friend was this
time) then you have almost no hope of getting past this and getting anything
new in.

\--edit--

The 'team' I'm referring to is wikipedia's "New Page Patrol". I appreciate it
exists to stop spam, hate pages etc from lasting too long, but in my
experience the people doing this are over-zealous and far too keen on
nominating things for "Speedy Deletion" based on their opinions about
notability.

~~~
JasonFruit
I have anecdotes too! I have recently created a few new articles that were not
only not deleted or nominated for deletion, but were immediately improved by
helpful, experienced editors.

~~~
Nursie
Good for you, and I'm glad you found it fruitful.

This has not been my experience recently and it appears I am far from alone. I
find wikipedia (the resource) very useful indeed and have a lot of respect for
the project and the outcome. I just think the community has problems.

------
a3n
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia)

------
datashovel
Machine learning will fix this. Currently it's likely the case that more info
is entered / updated than editors can handle, but once machine learning
systems point them toward "suspect" entries they'll be able to keep up with
everything I imagine.

------
emergentcypher
> That cartoon indicates the poster is trolling.

My sides!

------
imaginenore
I don't see how that's any different from any other religious character. All
the supernatural ones are made up too, you know.

~~~
mikeash
There's a major difference between a deity that people sincerely worshipped
and a deity that one guy just made up and nobody ever actually believed in.

Even if you're a hard-core atheist who places Yahweh on the same level as the
boogeyman (which describes me pretty well), you should still recognize the
cultural significance.

~~~
imaginenore
So the only difference is popularity. Religions like Scientology and Mormonism
pretty much proved that certain people will believe anything, there's no limit
to gullibility.

~~~
mikeash
The popularity difference between millions or billions of followers and _zero_
is important.

