http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/how-the-professor-who…
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A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers
tantalizing clues that a long-dead relative may actually have been a serial killer,
stalking the streets of New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A beer
enthusiast is presented by his neighbor with the original recipe for Brown's Ale,
salvaged decades before from the wreckage of the old brewery--the very building where the
Star-Spangled Banner was sewn in 1813. A student buys a sandwich called the Last American
Pirate and unearths the long-forgotten tale of Edward Owens, who terrorized the Chesapeake
Bay in the 1870s.
These stories have two things in common. They are all tailor-made for viral success on
the internet. And they are all lies.
Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason University who were
enrolled in T. Mills Kelly's course, Lying About the Past. Their escapades not only
went unpunished, they were actually encouraged by their professor. Four years ago,
students created a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of Edward Owens, successfully
fooling Wikipedia's community of editors. This year, though, one group of students
made the mistake of launching their hoax on Reddit. What they learned in the process
provides a valuable lesson for anyone who turns to the Internet for information.
The first time Kelly taught the course, in 2008, his students confected the life of
Edward Owens, mixing together actual lives and events with brazen fabrications. They
created YouTube videos, interviewed experts, scanned and transcribed primary documents,
and built a Wikipedia page to honor Owens' memory. The romantic tale of a pirate
plying his trade in the Chesapeake struck a chord, and quickly landed on USA Today's
pop culture blog. When Kelly announced the hoax at the end of the semester, some were
amused, applauding his pedagogical innovations. Many others were livid.
Critics decried the creation of a fake Wikipedia page as digital vandalism. "Things
like that really, really, really annoy me," fumed founder Jimmy Wales, comparing it
to dumping trash in the streets to test the willingness of a community to keep it clean.
But the indignation may, in part, have been compounded by the weaknesses the project
exposed. Wikipedia operates on a presumption of good will. Determined contributors, from
public relations firms to activists to pranksters, often exploit that, inserting
information they would like displayed. The sprawling scale of Wikipedia, with nearly four
million English-language entries, ensures that even if overall quality remains high, many
such efforts will prove successful.
One group took its inspiration from the fact that the
original Star-Spangled Banner had been sewn on the floor of Brown's Brewery in
Baltimore. The group decided that a story that good deserved a beer of its own. They
crafted a tale of discovering the old recipe used by Brown's to make its brews,
registered
BeerOf1812.com, built a Wikipedia page for the brewery, and tweeted out the
tale on their Twitter feed. No one suspected a thing. In fact, hardly anyone even noticed.
They did manage to fool one well-meaning DJ in Washington, DC, but the hoax was otherwise
a dud. The second group settled on the story of serial killer Joe Scafe. Using newspaper
databases, they identified four actual women murdered in New York City from 1895 to 1897,
victims of broadly similar crimes. They created Wikipedia articles for the victims,
carefully following the rules of the site. They concocted an elaborate story of discovery,
and fabricated images of the trunk's contents.
...it took just twenty-six minutes for a redditor to call foul, noting the Wikipedia
entries' recent vintage. Others were quick to pile on, deconstructing the entire tale.
The faded newspaper pages looked artificially aged. The Wikipedia articles had been posted
and edited by a small group of new users. Finding documents in an old steamer trunk
sounded too convenient. And why had Lisa been savvy enough to ask Reddit, but not enough
to Google the names and find the Wikipedia entries on her own? The hoax took months to
plan but just minutes to fail.
Why...One answer lies in the structure of the Internet's various communities.
Wikipedia has a weak community, but centralizes the exchange of information. It has a
small number of extremely active editors, but participation is declining, and most users
feel little ownership of the content. And although everyone views the same information,
edits take place on a separate page, and discussions of reliability on another, insulating
ordinary users from any doubts that might be expressed. Facebook, where the Lincoln hoax
took flight, has strong communities but decentralizes the exchange of information. Friends
are quite likely to share content and to correct mistakes, but those corrections won't
reach other users sharing or viewing the same content. Reddit, by contrast, builds its
strong community around the centralized exchange of information. Discussion isn't a
separate activity but the sine qua non of the site. When one user voiced doubts, others
saw the comment and quickly piled on.
Indeed. Why *are* the skeptical geeks now on Reddit and not Wikipedia?
--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism