Wikipedia Vandal Study - US Senate Options Rating

[thekohser]

(Edit: now posted at Wikipedia Review.com.)

Several months ago, a number of Wikipedia Review members joined me in a project to methodically enumerate one calendar quarter's worth (4Q 2007) of edit data underlying the 100 Wikipedia articles about the (then) current United States Senators.

What we found was alarming at times. While most vandalized edits were brief in duration and clearly juvenile in content, a substantial portion of edits were plainly intended to be hurtful and defamatory against the Senators -- and they lasted for not just minutes, but hours, days, even weeks at a time.

Using the Wikipedia page traffic tool, we attempted to interpolate the number of "page views" that each Senator's article likely witnessed during the damaged edit. The damaged edit that saw the greatest number of page views before correction regarded Senator John McCain: "McCain was born in Florida in the then American-controlled Panama Canal Zone", which lasted for over 3 days, under about 93,000 views where nobody noticed or bothered to correct this obvious error.

In all, the median duration of a damaged edit was 6 minutes, but the mean duration was 1,440 minutes (exactly 24 hours). These 100 articles were viewed approximately 12.8 million times in the fourth quarter of 2007. Over 378,000 of those views could be considered "damaged", yielding a 2.96% rate of damaged views. There were about 13.2 million article-minutes during the quarter, and over 901,000 of those article-minutes were in a damaged state -- 6.80%.

But, please, don't get lost in the net "damaged" versus "acceptable" rates. Rather, keep in mind that the Wikimedia Foundation allows anonymous editors to append the article about Hillary Clinton with "hillary needs to die and chop of her penis"; or to modify the article about Bob Menendez to say "Menendez and Jacobsen have since divorced because he was cheating on her"; all without any meaningful effort to change the parameters of editing to disallow this kind of drive-by hatred and libel.

The team behind this study invites you to see for yourself:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=psAWteTSyixEB98YcV-5VEw

We encourage you to find for yourselves the "worst of the worst" and react according to your conscience. Blog about it. E-mail your friends about it. Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Contact your state's two Senators to let them know about the damage that not only existed on Wikipedia, but continues on.

Ask yourself why this level of inaccuracy and defamation is tolerated on what purports to be a reliable, free encyclopedia. Why is it even legal? Learn more about what constitutes an "attractive nuisance" and what entities Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was intended by the framers of that law to protect. Is Wikipedia merely an "interactive computer service"?

We hope that this database will be educational for all who take the time to review it.

Sincerely,

Gregory Kohs

This post has been edited by thekohser:

[Jon Awbrey]

Ask yourself why this level of inaccuracy and defamation is tolerated on what purports to be a reliable, free encyclopedia.

I have asked this question uncounted times before — but do feel free to count up the stats — and I have repeatedly suggested a number of plausible answers, hypotheses based on long experience with Wikipedia and even longer experience with similar Psycho-Social-Technical Universes (PSTU's).

It is of course not really possible to have a coherent discussion of these orders of complex issues while yet in the midst of the very same PSTU.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

This post has been edited by Jon Awbrey:

[Jon Awbrey]

Ask yourself why this level of inaccuracy and defamation is tolerated on what purports to be a reliable, free encyclopedia.

I have asked this question uncounted times before — but do feel free to count up the stats — and I have repeatedly suggested a number of plausible answers, hypotheses based on long experience with Wikipedia and even longer experience with similar Psycho-Social-Technical Universes (PSTU's).

It is of course not really possible to have a coherent discussion of these orders of complex issues while yet in the midst of the very same PSTU.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

Just by way of a follow-up question —

One of the things that the Public needs to ask is — not just why this level of deception and defamation is tolerated in Wikipedia — but why that segment of the population who finds it "entertaining" is actually preferred to more mature and responsible demographics.

When you can answer that question, then you will have a clue to the previous array of puzzles.

For those of you who want a clue …

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

This post has been edited by Jon Awbrey:

[Somey]

One of the things that the Public needs to ask is — not just why this level of deception and defamation is tolerated in Wikipedia — but why that segment of the population who finds it "entertaining" is actually preferred to more mature and responsible demographics.

When you can answer that question, then you will have a clue to the previous array of puzzles.

This may seem like a poor analogy, and maybe it is, but they asked the same kinds of questions back in the 1960's, particularly in the UK, during the rise of "pop stars" and other types of media celebrities. The adult population was completely dismayed that kids, as well as some of the more culturally-literate, "hip" adults, were turning their collective backs on traditional culture and social mores in favor of what they saw as a primitive, uncivilized, "wild in the streets" mentality that eventually came to be known as "counter-culture," once it got to be reasonably well established.

There was nothing particularly wrong with the idea of shaking up the traditional culture, but many people saw very clearly how large groups of younger, politically inexperienced people could be manipulated by corrupt elements working within the (now widely-hated) "establishment" to turn them into what might ultimately amount to a fascist mob.

Movies were made about this. Most of them, such as Privilege (1967), were terrible, and lacked subtlety as well as decent plots. But at that time, mass media was in its infancy, still limited by technology we would now see as hopelessly primitive, and most people were only beginning to understand its potential. Anyone trying this today would certainly take advantage of the internet, with its promise of relatively safe anonymity and attendant lack of accountability, to build up a base of followers among people of all ages whose feelings of disenfranchisement and disempowerment have been brewing for years, during a period in which the rich have gotten richer than ever before, and everyone else has been left out.

And now that it has finally become clear that the "establishment" has been almost completely corrupt all along, has practically bankrupted the world economy with their short-term, greed-obsessed thinking, has stolen elections, and has pursued dangerous, even imperialistic military adventurism to no good purpose, what better time for the leadership (assuming there is any) of such groups to make their move?

Mind you, Wikipedia and its sister sites are only a small part of the overall picture, and it has yet to be proven that internet-based communities can actually wield political power. But if they can, I think we just have to hope that those who dominate the current Wikipedia community are clearly in the minority within the larger framework of the groups weilding such power, because if they aren't, we might actually be in worse trouble than we are now. (Assuming that's even possible!)

[Jon Awbrey]

One of the things that the Public needs to ask is — not just why this level of deception and defamation is tolerated in Wikipedia — but why that segment of the population who finds it "entertaining" is actually preferred to more mature and responsible demographics.

When you can answer that question, then you will have a clue to the previous array of puzzles.

This may seem like a poor analogy, and maybe it is, but they asked the same kinds of questions back in the 1960's, particularly in the UK, during the rise of "pop stars" and other types of media celebrities. The adult population was completely dismayed that kids, as well as some of the more culturally-literate, "hip" adults, were turning their collective backs on traditional culture and social mores in favor of what they saw as a primitive, uncivilized, "wild in the streets" mentality that eventually came to be known as "counter-culture," once it got to be reasonably well established.

There was nothing particularly wrong with the idea of shaking up the traditional culture, but many people saw very clearly how large groups of younger, politically inexperienced people could be manipulated by corrupt elements working within the (now widely-hated) "establishment" to turn them into what might ultimately amount to a fascist mob.

Movies were made about this. Most of them, such as Privilege (1967), were terrible, and lacked subtlety as well as decent plots. But at that time, mass media was in its infancy, still limited by technology we would now see as hopelessly primitive, and most people were only beginning to understand its potential. Anyone trying this today would certainly take advantage of the internet, with its promise of relatively safe anonymity and attendant lack of accountability, to build up a base of followers among people of all ages whose feelings of disenfranchisement and disempowerment have been brewing for years, during a period in which the rich have gotten richer than ever before, and everyone else has been left out.

And now that it has finally become clear that the "establishment" has been almost completely corrupt all along, has practically bankrupted the world economy with their short-term, greed-obsessed thinking, has stolen elections, and has pursued dangerous, even imperialistic military adventurism to no good purpose, what better time for the leadership (assuming there is any) of such groups to make their move?

Mind you, Wikipedia and its sister sites are only a small part of the overall picture, and it has yet to be proven that internet-based communities can actually wield political power. But if they can, I think we just have to hope that those who dominate the current Wikipedia community are clearly in the minority within the larger framework of the groups weilding such power, because if they aren't, we might actually be in worse trouble than we are now. (Assuming that's even possible!)

I did have a film in mind as The Best Illustration Of The Thematic Question —

It was of course A Clockwork Orange.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)