Hoaxes perpetuated via WP

Good, bad, biased, paid or what-have-you. There's an endless supply.
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ericbarbour
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Hoaxes perpetuated via WP

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Mar 23, 2020 11:38 pm

I've documented a couple dozen notorious hoaxes on the book wiki. But new ones are popping up all the time.

For example, this one didn't end until someone physically went to Isle Royale and looked for it:
He had found another article about Moose Boulder, published in 2009, that cited Wikipedia as its source of information. But the information about Moose Boulder had been added to Siskiwit Lake’s Wikipedia page in 2012. It was like a scene in a bad horror movie in which someone gets a phone call from a dead person. Dickey joked with his girlfriend that perhaps Moose Boulder does exist, but only in some kind of “temporal anomaly.”
Here’s the rub: Wikipedia is a nesting doll, too. Before a page for Siskiwit Lake had been added to the site, the page for Isle Royale had pointed readers to Moose Boulder, and had been doing so since 2009. It was put there by a different user than the one who added it to the Siskiwit page in 2012. Either way, that’s where the trail goes cold, and there’s no other evidence that the place exists. The identity of that first Wikipedia user to write about it—with those completely unrelated sources—remains a mystery, but all available evidence suggests that it was a person having a laugh, nothing more.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/m ... r-debunked

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Re: Hoaxes perpetuated via WP

Post by Abd » Wed Mar 25, 2020 6:01 pm

Remarkably, I had read about Ryan Island and Moose Boulder, but it never occurred to me to doubt the information, more than a little, nor to look at Gmap. Yeah, it was sketchy as hell. I'd question whether a transient pond would be considered a "lake." And that terrain doesn't look like it would support a pond. And a boulder sticking up out of a transient pond an "island"? But Wikipedia has no real fact-checking with any reliability. I've found blatant vandalism buried in an article, recent changes patrollers only catch certain kinds of common defacings, because the system discourages deeper examination and nobody is responsible for any article, unless they make themselves so.

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Re: Hoaxes perpetuated via WP

Post by Strelnikov » Mon Mar 30, 2020 12:08 am

Abd wrote:
Wed Mar 25, 2020 6:01 pm
Remarkably, I had read about Ryan Island and Moose Boulder, but it never occurred to me to doubt the information, more than a little, nor to look at Gmap. Yeah, it was sketchy as hell. I'd question whether a transient pond would be considered a "lake." And that terrain doesn't look like it would support a pond. And a boulder sticking up out of a transient pond an "island"? But Wikipedia has no real fact-checking with any reliability. I've found blatant vandalism buried in an article, recent changes patrollers only catch certain kinds of common defacings, because the system discourages deeper examination and nobody is responsible for any article, unless they make themselves so.
There are valleys all throughout Southern California that could be lakes, if it rained enough.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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Re: Hoaxes perpetuated via WP

Post by Abd » Mon Mar 30, 2020 6:02 pm

Right, because they don't have significant time spent filled with water. Dry lakes in the desert have been lakes at one time. We don't use the word "lake" for a very small seasonal pond, even if a seasonal pond exists on Ryan Island. It was a hoax, someone just made it up and then that was propagated and repeated without really considering how preposterous it was.

How much stuff like this is floating around?

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“List of hoaxes on Wikipedia”

Post by CMAwatch » Thu Jul 09, 2020 12:03 pm

“List of hoaxes on Wikipedia”

What are your thoughts on this?
#BbbGate
Weaponizing WP:G5
Oops! Didn't think we'd see? It's right there on WikipediaSucks.co!
ericbarbour wrote:
Wed Sep 09, 2020 4:22 am
[Wikipedia is] a stupid video game, and the "encyclopedia" is an accidental byproduct.

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Re: “List of hoaxes on Wikipedia”

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Jul 11, 2020 1:38 am

CMAwatch wrote:
Thu Jul 09, 2020 12:03 pm
“List of hoaxes on Wikipedia”
What are your thoughts on this?

I posted on Wikipediocracy and the previous version of this forum in the past: it is a GROSSLY INCOMPLETE list. We will never know how many hoaxes there were or are, because they are often deleted quietly or just covered up.

That list was greatly expanded in 2014....after various people humiliated them on Wikipediocracy about it. Several threads were involved. And some of the hoaxes I compiled on the book wiki STILL are not listed there. And probably never will be.

What was the earliest "hoax"? We could argue about that for years. Although I would point at some of the rabid pro-Israel crap RK was posting in late 2001. And Tim Shell's copypaste of loads of crap about Atlas Shrugged in February 2001, most of it straight from Tim's own Ayn Rand fanboy website. You CANNOT see it in any history on Wikipedia today: you must dig for it. I suspect Jimbo himself deleted it because it was quite embarrassing. At the time, something like 6% of Wikipedia's total content consisted of Tim Shell's ravings about Objectivism.

https://reagle.org/joseph/2010/wp/redux/

Quote from Larry Sanger:
"It's possible that Tim copied the stuff from an Objectivism website of his own. I very very vaguely remember that he had one. I know he had a personal home page with various writings of his. He might have had the Objectivism stuff there on that website. Sounds plausible, but I don't remember specifically."
"I think the Atlas stuff was on Wikipedia for quite a while, for most of 2001. Maybe June or July, but I would have guessed more like October. I remember the stuff being there for a long time. I remember people saying, "Why is this stuff still here?""
(PS: two threads were merged.)

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Re: Hoaxes perpetuated via WP

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Sep 07, 2020 3:03 am

Found on Facebook. No idea where it came from, but it's perfectly formatted like a WP userbox.
battleoflaketravis.jpg
battleoflaketravis.jpg (29.44 KiB) Viewed 5485 times

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Re: Hoaxes perpetuated via WP

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Dec 23, 2020 9:14 am

I was reminded about the existence of Cris Shapan today--he's a near-legendary hoaxster who uses Facebook to spread his phony vintage advertisements, book and album covers, etc. And millions of FB users are stupid enough to think they're real.

https://dangerousminds.net/comments/eve ... t_for_this
Cris Shapan: Yeah, it’s scary to see something I did purely to entertain friends become someone else’s reality. Some claim to remember or even own something that never existed. Others will repost a parody ad as real, especially if it reinforces some agenda they’re touting (sexism in advertising, the past was a horrible place, frankenfood, etc.). People read the fake ad copy and leap to the wildest interpretations, often expressing outrage at something that never actually happened. It’s just bizarre. Some people are so convinced these parody pieces are genuine that they’ve gone in and modified Wikipedia pages to reflect their existence, which of course compounds the stupidity.
This is something you WILL NOT find mentioned in the "Hoaxes on Wikipedia" article or in any noticeboard. You might riff around in article histories for examples of Shapan jokes that were posted on WP as "facts". I am looking thru Joe Flynn's article history and if there is any mention of his "famous eggs" there, either it's well-hidden, or someone oversighted it--would not put it past some oversighter to cover it up. There could be other Shapan items elsewhere.

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Re: Hoaxes perpetuated via WP

Post by Dr Mario » Wed Mar 17, 2021 2:15 pm

Appart from invidual articles Hoaxes on WP, it must be said that the biggest hoax peretuated by Wikipedia is that WP pretends to be a reputable encylopedia. Why? Well WP is collection on various poorly organized and written articles (there are some good articles on there inbetween mind you). Were sources range from non existant to properly sourced. Yet many of the sources used are of questionable origin and thus wouldn't be considered valid in any academy research. Not to mention content inclusion and exclusion, as there plenty of content on wikipedia that shouldn't and wouldn't be under any normal circumstances have been included in an encyclopedia while content that should have articles on WB does not.

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Re: Hoaxes perpetuated via WP

Post by ericbarbour » Fri Jul 23, 2021 11:36 pm

I should also drop here, that very few WP hoaxes ever amount to very much in the "real world". Or what passes for "reality".

When it comes to false information, hoaxing, and astroturfing, Wikipedia is always very far down on the list. It rarely causes outright harm to people. (At least, THAT WE KNOW OF. Since the cult members are sometimes capable of covering up real scandals, there's no way to be certain.)

Facebook, on the other hand.....

https://www.zdnet.com/article/on-facebo ... commended/

And FB is even more secretive than the WMF.

https://www.businessinsider.com/faceboo ... nda-2021-7

Anyone remember Ronnie McNutt?

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/cu ... e-1056959/

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