Long-lasting hoax (and "Good Article") deleted

[thekohser]

In the past there were a whole raft of websites with 'good' information, from a variety of sources, that made you smile, or made you think, there still are if you look beyond the first google page. Unfortunately, those sites are buried way down the search engine listings. Wikipedia tends to push them way down...

Lilburne is right.

Bing search for '"consumer economy" wiki' brings up a Wikipedia article, Consumer economy (T-H-L) as the #1 result. That article contains 1,061 bytes of information.

You could go down through the first 200 of the other results on Bing, but you won't find this alternative wiki's summary of what is "consumer economy", at 7,600 bytes, and including a helpful graph.

Why is that "better", now that Wikipedia has driven out competing wikis?

[HRIP7]

I take your point. It was hard enough for us to get a grasp on the story as it was happening. I still do think this particular story is being blown a bit out of proportion; I mean, in the pre-Wikipedia days when looking for information you got websites full of any old bullshit and they lasted forever without any way of being dealt with (or until their free webhost got abruptly shut down years later). There's plenty of crud on the 'pedia, as everyone here knows, but at least there is the possibility of it going away, and you get references to follow up for real research.

For me the real value of this is that it exposes how shoddy the article rating system can be. Looking at the (deleted) talk page, the GA review was conducted by just one guy (I don't know if that was common in 2007, or still is - it's not an area I've participated in) and includes this gem:

Where books are cited as references, Cite ISBN numbers. [tick] Done

I guess actually checking the ISBNs against their titles was a bit too much work.

GA reviews have always been done by an individual, and that can be anyone – a school kid or a professor.

Someone has started an RfC in response to this story ... which at the time of writing seems to be going nowhere.

[HRIP7]

The question now is whether the Bicholim Conflict hoax is notable enough for a Wikipedia article. After all, there has been worldwide coverage.

[EricBarbour]

The question now is whether the Bicholim Conflict hoax is notable enough for a Wikipedia article. After all, there has been worldwide coverage.

No one's tried it yet. It's been discussed on noticeboards and talkpages, but the only "official" mention is on the list of hoaxes, which is usually a guarantee it won't get its own article.

(Anyone watching this category? Note the old history of the category....
apparently there were NO hoaxes on Wikipedia, until 2009. But people diddled and vandalized the category anyway.....)

[Mason]

The question now is whether the Bicholim Conflict hoax is notable enough for a Wikipedia article. After all, there has been worldwide coverage.

At the very least it should merit a section in Reliability of Wikipedia (T-H-L) but it appears that so far no one has tried to add anything about it.

[Poetlister]

Wikipedia has a built in tendency to fossilize. It cannot ever reflect the latest developments as it needs to have extensive tertiary sources, a work that is being written by a subject expert can reflect the latest research, and consensus of experts well before is covered sufficiently well in tertiary sources. Example would be Relativity, which supersede the Newtonian model very quickly in Physics, it was decades before sufficient tertiary sources were available, such that wikiepdia would be able to categorically acknowledge it as the dominant theory. Or take Evolution, which is still being fought and resisted by the Paleyites on wikipedia pages.

Yes wikipedia can change Richard II to Edward III or fix the date. But the suspect article is still based on two articles from the 1920s. Given the amount of additional material that has been discovered in archives and made available since then, it would be remarkable if those articles still reflected current expert opinion.

IOW wikipedia can never be as up to date as a real work written by experts.

This is not quite correct. The policy is to rely as far as possible on reliable secondary sources. Tertiary sources are deprecated in general. Secondary sources come along quite rapidly; for science, New Scientist wil cover breaking news in a week or two. Of course, if a controversy develops (evolution, climate change or whatever), you may never get consensus, regardless of how many secondary or tertiary sources you have.

Undoubtedly many articles don't use the latest available good sources. That doesn't mean that such sources don't exist. History Today and the BBC History Magazine might be excellent sources.

[Daniel Brandt]

Don't forget the island of Porchesia. Google remembers.

[HRIP7]

Another hoaxer got banned the other day, partly as a result of the Bicholim Conflict coverage:

Legolas2186 (T-C-L)

Legolas authored countless Good Articles and Featured Articles, many of them on Madonna and Lady Gaga.

In February, Binksternet (T-C-L) raised a concern at the Reliable Sources noticeboard.

This resulted in people beginning to do work on fixing sundry citation problems. As with the Bicholim hoaxer, some publications did not exist, or the claimed quotes could not be found in them.

Legolas was blocked on January 4 2013 for hoaxing, after this ANI thread.

I notice that NuclearWarfare recently indef blocked User:A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a for creating the Bicholim conflict hoax many year before. Ssilvers then changed A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a's user page to reflect that.

At User talk:Legolas2186/Fixing citation problems, more than ten months have gone by since editors started cleaning up after Legolas2186's false references and fabricated quotes, especially ones attributed to Madonna (entertainer), a BLP. We were all hoping Legolas2186 would join in cleaning up the mess he left but he has not done so. He has not edited since 12 February 2012. Is it time to block him as a hoaxer? If so, should his user page reflect that fact? Binksternet (talk) 16:28, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

This account has been indefinitely blocked upon review of outstanding claims of fabrication of sources and quotes. Damaging the integrity of Wikipedia is not acceptable behavior.
If the account wishes to return to editing it may request unblock, but cooperation with the investigation of source accuracy would be a prerequisite. Georgewilliamherbert (talk) 01:44, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

If Legolas' work was as problematic as it looks from these links, there must still be dozens of made-up quotes and sources in various Good and Featured Articles on Wikipedia.

[Hex]

"Porchesia" was created 22 November 2005 by Charoog10 (T-C-L). Saw five edits by that user, culminating in this text:*

'''Porchesia''' or also known as Porchess Island, is an island off the coast of [[Syria]] and [[Lebanon]]. It is currently ruled by Lebanonese government. Languages spoken on Porchesia include [[Arabic language|Arabic]], [[English language|English]], and [[Greek language|Greek]], while religions include [[Sunni Muslim]]. The biggest city on Porchesia is Sheikah. Porchesia currently has a population of 354,897, when in 1982 it had a population of 129,750.

[[Category:Islands]]

Speedy deleted 30 September 2006 by Danny (T-C-L). Uncyclopedia user Mordillo created a page there about the deletion ("The Porchesian Holocaust") on 19 February 2007‎. Insineratehymn (T-C-L) recreated the article on 22 February 2007; speedy deleted by Enochlau (T-C-L) two hours later.

* To my understanding, this text is licensed under the GFDL 1.2.

[HRIP7]

One of Legolas's FAs was Madonna (entertainer) (T-H-L). He nominated it in May 2010.

After Binksternet raised the alarm in early 2012, it was demoted.

Here editors were concerned that Legolas seemed to have put words into Madonna's mouth:

...in that edit a vast amount of information was added, including the sentence With SongTalk magazine, Madonna explained that "isolated by fame and shaken by the failure of my marriage, I could only reach out to the stability of my family roots, and 'Keep It Together' is for that only." supposedly sourced by one of the references listed above and page 122 of the book Madonna: Like an Icon by Lucy O'Brien. The book is viewable on 'Look inside' option on Amazon.com, and there is nothing of the kind on page 122. Page 131 does however say There is the sense that Madonna, isolated by fame and shaken by the failure of her marriage, is reaching back to the stability of family roots. but that is written solely by the author, and not a quote from Madonna. I find the suggestion that an editor has fabricated references and a quote from a living person to be very troubling, and would suggest this is moved to another noticeboard. 86.186.68.76 (talk) 20:37, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

That item is actually mentioned in Wikipedia's List of hoaxes. The write-up there says,

Paul Zollo wrote no such article title, and the volume and issue are not in keeping with the magazine's normal series.

Here is a case where Legolas seems to have passed off a substandard source as another, more reputable one, in order to be able to include the material:

At Get Together (Madonna song), Legolas2186 performed a "major expansion for GA" way back in July 2009. He added a link to an interview of Nathaniel Howe, a 3D animator and PR/branding artist. The link was to the "Drowned Madonna" fansite which is no longer working: http://www.drownedmadonna.com/modules.p ... aniel_howe. The Wayback Machine has the interview here, archived from July 2007. Legolas misrepresented that Howe was interviewed by Madonna's official website Icon, but the link is to the fansite Drowned World, and the interviewer calls him- or herself "Drowned World", not Icon. Up to this point, the quote is accurate and the text from the website is accurately summarized, but the website is a weak source, arguably not reliable enough.

People rely on Wikipedia to a very large degree for pop culture trivia, and we usually concede that it's an okay source for that. But if Wikipedia has Featured Articles and Good Articles with quotes and interviews that are made up, on someone as prominent as Madonna, it may not be such a great idea!

[lilburne]

Not surprising given the number of times we've seen Celebs saying that their bio is full of crap.