[WikiEN-l] "How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit", _The Atlantic_

[Ian Woollard]

On 17 May 2012 03:58, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> But no, you don't need to guess: you edit Wikipedia, you already know
> what external links usually look like, and how many are bad on
> average. (From actually doing the deletions, my own appraisal is that
> <10% were at all questionable, and I felt pretty bad deleting most of
> them.)
>

Ignoring the ethics of vandalising Wikipedia in the first place, if you'd
have picked something other than external links, that might, or might not
have been a good test.

Last time I checked (which admittedly was a while ago) Wikipedia had a
noticeboard whose entire purpose, was essentially to delete as many
external links as possible, they'd even added a policy that said they could
do that in every single case unless you could get a majority in a poll to
keep individual links; oh and in practice they pretty much !vote-stuffed
those polls too by announcing the polls on the noticeboard, so the chances
of a clear majority was low. Oh, and there was a bunch of shady anonymous
IPs involved as well that swing around after the fact to edit war them away
anyway if an external link they didn't favor gets through all that.

Basically, external links are one of the most hated parts of Wikipedia, and
if hardly any of them got fixed it wouldn't surprise me, and wouldn't prove
anything very much.

But nevertheless, thanks for admitting to vandalising Wikipedia 100 times.
If you supply your Wikipedia account details we can arrange for it to be
blocked.

--
> gwern
>
-- 
-Ian Woollard