geniice in #wikipedia posted this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Robert_Mugabe...
I notified #wikimedia and got the response I should post it here.
Content is as follow:
Yesterday in the House of Commons, [[James Duddridge]] MP asked the following question of [[Ian McCartney]], government minister. [http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmtoday/cmdebate/04.htm] (link will change soon)
"Can the Minister confirm that [[Robert Mugabe]]'s daughter, Bona Mugabe, is currently studying at the London School of Economics, and if so, can he say who is paying?"
The reply "On the first part of the hon. Gentleman's question, I understand that that is the case. On the second part, I am not certain so I cannot answer. I will write to the hon. Gentleman and place a copy in the Library of the House. In response to the hon. Member for Cotswold I said, without prompting, that we should seriously consider extending the travel ban to children and other members of the family."
This made the news, with several dozen stories [http://news.google.co.uk/news?hl=en&ned=uk&q=bona+mugabe].
Subsequently, it appears this is completely false. Here's an account which shows the retraction and also official anger from Zimbabwe [http://www.newzimbabwe.com/pages/chatunga5.16183.html],
*"Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, Zimbabwe's Minister of Information told New Zimbabwe.com that the original claims by McCartney were "part of the many lies they have been peddling about Zimbabwe".
*He said: "This is just one of a thousand lies they have been peddling against Zimbabwe. The British government continues to make so many statements which are untrue, obnoxious and concocted.
*"I am glad to note that the minister has withdrawn his false claims. He should be embarrassed with himself and his government. But we prefer to let him stew in his malicious lies which must be positioned in the bigger plot to unsettle the elected government of Zimbabwe."
The story has been officially denied by the London School of Economics - she is not studying there, but nonetheless the result of the false story is that [http://www.guardian.co.uk/zimbabwe/article/0,,2043658,00.html] the travel ban against Mugabe's family will be extended.
Now this part is somewhat speculative, but it appears likely, given that the story is entirely false, and that Mugabe's daughter is NOT studying at LSE at all, that the original source of the false information is Wikipedia. An anonymous IP, using the Swedish ISP Labs2 inserted the following text on 4th November 2006:[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_Mugabe&diff=85665104&am...]
"Their children however are not included to the EU travel sanctions, in fact Bona Mugabe has entered an elite social sciences university ([[London School of Economics]]) in the [[United Kingdom]] in September 2006 Formerly [http://www.lse.ac.uk/directory/students/ LSE Student Email Directory] now only accessible through [https://lfylive.lse.ac.uk/lfy/up/uPortal/render.userLayoutRootNode.uP LSE for You] "
In fact the student directory is fully publicly accessible - "LSE for You" access isn't required, and Mugabe's name is not there.
This information remained in the article, untouched until it was removed by another anonymous IP with no other edits [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_Mugabe&diff=115342005&a...], on March 15th. But this time the anon IP was in the LSE itself [http://whois.domaintools.com/158.143.22.118], and likely able to verify the truth of the Swedish IP's claim.
The information is still still in many wikipedia mirrors, such as answers.com[http://www.google.co.uk/search?num=100&hl=en&q=bona+mugabe+london+sc...]
In summary, it appears that we have an entirely baseless claim that remained in wikipedia for five months (the information was added back yesterday, but following the initial news stories, not the dodgy claim about the email directory), and is still extant on the web in mirrors. This claim has I believe led an MP to make a question in Parliament, followed by a false statement by a minister, and now a minor diplomatic incident. This is the only plausible explanation, as statements in wikipedia tend to be treated as knowledge, so anyone reading the article (such as an MP) between November and March 15 (or still now, on mirror sites), would 'know' that Bona Mugabe was at the LSE, handy 'knowledge' for use in Parliamentary debates on Zimbabwe.
The other explanation, that LSE is lying, and that Bona Mugabe is actually studying there, is implausible as there are thousands of students there, and it would be implausible that following an official denial, one of those students (at what is a Universities known for its politics) would not call their bluff. There's just no way they could lie about this. [[User:Nssdfdsfds|Nssdfdsfds]] 08:38, 27 March 2007 (UTC) ::And the ''other other'' explanation is that there are vast potential sources of misinformation in the world outside of Wikipedia. It does not seem unlikely that this is just a rumor which both the article poster and the MP heard.--[[User:Pharos|Pharos]] 01:10, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
:It is also of course possible that the IP was going off of a rumour on another website or thought he'd seen her, or whatever, rather than that he deliberately made it up. But we probably are the ones incidentally to blame for publicizing it. Not really much we can do about that sort of thing though, other than try futilely to convince people that we aren't supposed to be perfect. --[[User:tjstrf|tjstrf]] <small>[[User talk:tjstrf|talk]]</small> 01:10, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
::A google search shows no sources for the information outside of Wikipedia. [[User:Nssdfdsfds|Nssdfdsfds]] 13:04, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
If a minister is going to make a statement before parliament based on reading something on Wikipedia, that's his problem, not ours. Wikipedia articles sometimes contain errors, we, of course, work to reduce them as much as possible, but we'll never eliminate them completely. If this minor diplomatic incident really was a result of the Wikipedia article, then the blame falls squarely on the minister in question, nowhere else.
On 3/29/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
If a minister is going to make a statement before parliament based on reading something on Wikipedia, that's his problem, not ours. Wikipedia articles sometimes contain errors, we, of course, work to reduce them as much as possible, but we'll never eliminate them completely. If this minor diplomatic incident really was a result of the Wikipedia article, then the blame falls squarely on the minister in question, nowhere else.
IMHO, "it's your fault for believing us", while true, is not fair or realistic as our only response to such issues.
"Your honor, I should not be convinced of murder simply because he failed to get out of the way of the stabs I made with my knife." ... see... it just doesn't fly. :)
The responsibility to avoid harm is shared. The public should try to avoid harm by being skeptical about what they receive, and we should try to avoid harm by being as careful as we can within our structure to be good about what we transmit.
I, and many others with reasonably long tenures by our standards, believe we have a number of substantial quality problems which we are undertaking insufficient efforts to address.
I don't have any magic solutions, but I can't sit by and dismiss such concerns by throwing the entire responsibility on our users.
On 29/03/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
The responsibility to avoid harm is shared. The public should try to avoid harm by being skeptical about what they receive, and we should try to avoid harm by being as careful as we can within our structure to be good about what we transmit.
I, and many others with reasonably long tenures by our standards, believe we have a number of substantial quality problems which we are undertaking insufficient efforts to address.
I don't have any magic solutions, but I can't sit by and dismiss such concerns by throwing the entire responsibility on our users.
Quite. Whilst the responsibility for whatever diplomatic fracas resulted* is on the shoulders of whoever lifted material from Wikipedia, it doesn't change the fact that we fucked up in leaving it there for them to lift.
On 29/03/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I don't have any magic solutions, but I can't sit by and dismiss such concerns by throwing the entire responsibility on our users.
Oh, it's easy. We just add "Wikipedia is not a source of killer questions for parliamentary point-scoring" to [[WP:NOT]]. And someone from Wikinews might want to ask said parliamentarian what on earth they were thinking.
- d.
I suppose a question in uk-parliament based on false wiki-info, followed by a false answer, and an unnecessary diplomatic incident would make a good article on wikinews? ;-)
On 3/29/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 29/03/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I don't have any magic solutions, but I can't sit by and dismiss such concerns by throwing the entire responsibility on our users.
Oh, it's easy. We just add "Wikipedia is not a source of killer questions for parliamentary point-scoring" to [[WP:NOT]]. And someone from Wikinews might want to ask said parliamentarian what on earth they were thinking.
- d.
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On Thu, 29 Mar 2007, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 3/29/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
If a minister is going to make a statement before parliament based on reading something on Wikipedia, that's his problem, not ours. Wikipedia articles sometimes contain errors, we, of course, work to reduce them as much as possible, but we'll never eliminate them completely. If this minor diplomatic incident really was a result of the Wikipedia article, then the blame falls squarely on the minister in question, nowhere else.
IMHO, "it's your fault for believing us", while true, is not fair or realistic as our only response to such issues.
While I do agree with this point, an MP making a statement in parliament should be double checking all facts (don't they have staff to do this?). Verification from a primary source (ie, LSE) should have been sought.
I'll point out that IMHO anon edits do more harm to WP than good. If people care about the project let them create an account - it takes perhaps 30 seconds?
Rob
On 3/29/07, Robert Brockway rbrockway@opentrend.net wrote:
While I do agree with this point, an MP making a statement in parliament should be double checking all facts (don't they have staff to do this?). Verification from a primary source (ie, LSE) should have been sought.
I'll point out that IMHO anon edits do more harm to WP than good. If people care about the project let them create an account - it takes perhaps 30 seconds?
We've never demonstrated that turning off anon-page creation made a substantial improvement on enwiki... I wouldn't make claims like yours without seeing it.
Think of it this way, if you see a little error you'd like to correct, why would you also want to jump through a login hoop.. after all you're doing US a favor.
If instead you'd like to put in some amusing piece of vandalism, you'd probably jump through a dozen hoops to pull it off. Some crackers will spend weeks of work sometimes to deface a single webpage...
In any case, the harm caused by vandalism itself is very minor. The harm caused by our current practice of always instantly distributing anonymous edits to the entire world, is what is actually of concern.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 3/29/07, Robert Brockway rbrockway@opentrend.net wrote:
While I do agree with this point, an MP making a statement in parliament should be double checking all facts (don't they have staff to do this?). Verification from a primary source (ie, LSE) should have been sought.
I'll point out that IMHO anon edits do more harm to WP than good. If people care about the project let them create an account - it takes perhaps 30 seconds?
We've never demonstrated that turning off anon-page creation made a substantial improvement on enwiki... I wouldn't make claims like yours without seeing it.
Think of it this way, if you see a little error you'd like to correct, why would you also want to jump through a login hoop.. after all you're doing US a favor.
If instead you'd like to put in some amusing piece of vandalism, you'd probably jump through a dozen hoops to pull it off. Some crackers will spend weeks of work sometimes to deface a single webpage...
In any case, the harm caused by vandalism itself is very minor. The harm caused by our current practice of always instantly distributing anonymous edits to the entire world, is what is actually of concern.
I have wondered if it might be something useful for some of our projects to have a "published" page that would be a snapshot of the regular page that most of the people who have worked on and tried to develop the content on that page could say is slightly more authoritative than the general "draft" page. I'm not talking anything fancy here, but perhaps something like a "publish" tab for an admin or other trusted user that would create a permalink to the current version of the page. The "draft" page would still be editable as normal, and it would be considered pro forma for users to request a particular page to get this published status. Perhaps something on the talk pages for more controversial content like the George W. Bush article, where the active content developers would decide what version is more or less ready for prime time and free of most vandalism.
While this is something that could be gamed by vandals, I think it would be quite a bit harder to produce some of the raw garbage such as what was added to this article about Robert Mugabe. At the very least, articles that generally aren't watched (or seldom watched) would have a stable version that wouldn't necessarily require constant vigilance by the vandalism patrol to keep them current. And you could diff the draft from the published article to help spot some of the vandals like this individual and the one that massacred the Siegenthaler article as well.
Certainly something needs to happen here, as like it or not, Wikipedia is being taken much more seriously than it was a few years ago. I know the Wikipedia 1.0 crew is trying other methods to come up with quality articles to showcase, but more could be done. And we have to somehow balance the need to expand the user base for Wikimedia projects with trying to come up with quality content.
Allowing anon editing is merely one tool to try and encourage new people to come in and join our projects. The more steps they have to go through in order to become considered full members of our community, the harder it will be to get people to help us out.
-- Robert Horning
On 3/29/07, Robert Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
We've never demonstrated that turning off anon-page creation made a substantial improvement on enwiki... I wouldn't make claims like yours without seeing it.
Firstly, calling them "anonymous" as we do is silly, and is part of why some of the people opposed to registration used to complain about being asked to create accounts... "You want to take my anonymity! I'm secret!". IP users are far less anonymous than the majority of our pseudonymous users.
Secondly, there was little effect from disabling IP page creation because it was IP /page creation/, not IP page /editing/. Creation does very little damage, and can be evaluated more easily. If an IP creates an attack page, it'll get deleted (usually).
When crap gets inserted into an existing good article, it's more likely to slip by. (and then there's articles that are such vandalpits that they pretty much become sacrifice zones...)
I've never been convinced of the benefits of IP-address editing, honestly. Our username registration is so easy and lax... there's no "barrier"... (or at least there had better not be. I tend to assume everything's like it was a couple years ago, and keep being surprised to find processcruft...) IP editing also makes licensing issues and some agreements murkier than it would if they registered for a name and clicked the 'I have agreed to the terms and conditions' checkbox at that time (rather than the 'by submitting this, yada yada in the edit screen). (Note that I said "murkier". I'm not saying anything against the validity of the current approach.)
The vast majority of vandalism is done by those without an account. That much we know. It'd be nice if we could research how many useful contributions have come from IP users in the last couple years. "the last couple years" being important, because while I know there used to be a number of good IP contributors, I believe that class of people generally have accounts these days.
I've drifted off my point. IP page creation has very low damage potential, so it's not useful to compare it with IP editing. The cost/benefit ratio of IP editing needs to be evaluated to move forward.
-- Jake Nelson [[en:User:Jake Nelson]]
Jake Nelson wrote:
Firstly, calling them "anonymous" as we do is silly, and is part of why some of the people opposed to registration used to complain about being asked to create accounts... "You want to take my anonymity! I'm secret!". IP users are far less anonymous than the majority of our pseudonymous users.
I agree with this of course, but you are attacking some of our most sacred jargon, and attacks on jargon tend to be fruitless. :-)
Ec
On 3/29/07, Carl Fürstenberg azatoth@gmail.com wrote:
"Can the Minister confirm that [[Robert Mugabe]]'s daughter, Bona Mugabe, is currently studying at the London School of Economics, and if so, can he say who is paying?"
If this did indeed play out this way, it is deeply concerning and reminiscent of ''The Onion's'' parody of Wikipedia: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/50902
I can only repeat what is already known; the implementation of a community approval method for article revisions is underway with the help of a contractor (some volunteers have recently jumped in). Progress is slower than I would like.
Even if we succeed and take a demo live soon, this will not be a magic bullet, as the actual processes of approval (and their scalability) will be the real challenge. Given the continuing damage to Wikipedia's reputation done by our inability to reliably distinguish useful content from rubbish, I'm almost inclined to support switching the site into a GMail style invite-only lockdown until we have a proper solution. Necessity, after all, is the mother of invention.
On 30/03/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 3/29/07, Carl Fürstenberg azatoth@gmail.com wrote:
"Can the Minister confirm that [[Robert Mugabe]]'s daughter, Bona Mugabe, is currently studying at the London School of Economics, and if so, can he say who is paying?"
If this did indeed play out this way, it is deeply concerning and reminiscent of ''The Onion's'' parody of Wikipedia: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/50902 I can only repeat what is already known; the implementation of a community approval method for article revisions is underway with the help of a contractor (some volunteers have recently jumped in). Progress is slower than I would like.
And even then, it won't cure phenomena such as this politician being a bloody idiot. I mean, what on earth?
- d.
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