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Wikipedia: re-writing history

15253561470_d6e5af7e0c_oBy Andreas Kolbe

For more than six years, Wikipedia named an innocent man, Joe Streater, as a key culprit in the 1978–79 Boston College basketball point shaving scandal. Thanks to the detective work of Ben Koo at sports blog Awful Announcing, the world now knows (again!) that Joe Streater had no involvement in the affair. He couldn’t have, because he didn’t even play for the team in the 1978–79 season.

Entering the Wikipedia wormhole

In his article, Guilt by Wikipedia: How Joe Streater Became Falsely Attached To The Boston College Point Shaving Scandal, Ben Koo describes how he fell “down this wormhole” that ended at an anonymous Wikipedia edit made over six years ago.

It began like this: Koo had reviewed a 30 for 30 documentary on the Boston College point shaving scandal for Awful Announcing. In this review, he remarked on the curious fact that one of the four players eventually tied to the scandal wasn’t mentioned in the film at all.

This prompted a puzzled email inquiry from a former Boston College player who’d been involved in the affair: Which player did Koo mean? Koo replied that he had found it curious that Joe Streater hadn’t been mentioned in the documentary, given that all the articles he had read as part of his background research had named Streater as one of the sportsmen involved. The reply he got from the former Boston player astonished him:

“Joe Streater wasn’t even on the team that infamous year as he had left school the year before.”

At first, Koo was incredulous. How could this be? Streater was mentioned in Wikipedia and so many other articles on the web.

…continue reading Wikipedia: re-writing history

Wikipedia’s New Year begins with a hoax

By Andreas Kolbe and Tippi Hadron

[To view or participate in a forum discussion on this topic, please click here.]

On New Year’s Day, The Daily Dot reported that a “massive Wikipedia hoax” had finally been exposed, after more than five years. Wikipedia’s article on the “Bicholim Conflict”, listed as a “Good Article” for the past half-decade, had turned out to be a complete invention, the key sources cited in it non-existent.

As The Daily Dot put it:

Up until a week ago, here is something you could have learned from Wikipedia:

From 1640 to 1641 the might of colonial Portugal clashed with India’s massive Maratha Empire in an undeclared war that would later be known as the Bicholim Conflict. Named after the northern Indian region where most of the fighting took place, the conflict ended with a peace treaty that would later help cement Goa as an independent Indian state.

Except none of this ever actually happened. The Bicholim Conflict is a figment of a creative Wikipedian’s imagination. It’s a huge, laborious, 4,500 word hoax. And it fooled Wikipedia editors for more than 5 years.

The Bicholim Conflict article was the creation of a Wikipedian known only as A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a. The user had succeeded in having his piece listed as a Good Article in 2007, a quality award given to no more than about 1 out of every 250 Wikipedia entries. Shortly after, he had even submitted his work for Featured Article status, Wikipedia’s highest quality award. That attempt failed – the reviewers’ opinion was that the entry relied too heavily on a small number of sources, and the review petered out.

However, the Featured Article reviewers did not spot that the key sources cited in the piece were entirely made up. Nor did they spot that the Maratha Empire

…continue reading Wikipedia’s New Year begins with a hoax