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Vandalism
From Wikitruth
The encyclopedia that anyone can vandalize
This is the way of the world; people can spend hours crafting a sand-castle, putting all the windows in the right place, making sure the little turrets are the same height and the paths and garden out front are completely even... and then it takes some nib-nob about 10 seconds to crush it all into a pile of waste. The urge to create is strong; but the urge to lay havoc and waste is even stronger.
With the Wiki concept, "anybody can edit". But nobody says those edits have to be good. Nobody said they have to make sense or reason. And certainly nobody said the newer edits have to be better than the old ones. Many times, the new changes to a Wiki article are better - more details, better spelling, improved grammar and arrangement. But many other times, it ends up being worse: removed "controversial" lines, "simplified" versions of perfectly good paragraphs because some bo-tard decided he didn't get it, and ever the triumph of the Urban Myth over the actual researched facts.
Worse yet, a lot of these worsening changes are not made out of incompetency, where someone is trying to do the "right thing" and just making it worse... sometimes, it's actually an attempt to wreck Wikipedia. Instead of trying to improve it, they are trying to make it not just worse, but unusable. Libelous. Inaccurate. Irrelevant. Why? Why not. The rewards for destroying Wikipedia are, after all, sometimes greater than the rewards for improving it: lots of attention, hilarious "debates", intense writing from obsessed nerdlings horrified that you stuck a giant wiener next to a head of state's name. It's like fireworks without the annoying smell in your clothes.
My First Vandalism
Of course, the most obvious way to vandalize Wikipedia is to take advantage of the "anybody can edit" credo to edit in absolute crap. This natural urge, the most basic of human drives when encountering Wikipedia and the little "edit" tab, is personified in this newspaper article:
Librarian Michelle Cowell was telling her eighth-grade students that anyone in the world could edit the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia when one boy started giggling. "Ooh, I just changed it," he announced. Within five minutes, two more students had altered a Saddam Hussein article. "The first thing they did was change it to say, "He has bad breath,' "He has stinky feet,' " said Cowell, of Waverly-Shell Rock Junior High in Waverly, Iowa. She didn't approve, but had to admit: "It is real easy. It kind of proved my point for them." - Nicole Gaudiano, Gannett News Service, April 1, 2006
Pretty basic stuff, and at this point, Wikipedian editors have created enough home-grown tools (programs, scripts and the like) to be able to flag the classic some retard with no previous edits has made a single change to an article without logging into an account. The damage will be undone in a mouse's heartbeat, and the article will be returned to normal.
At that point, the giggling eighth-grader will get some sort of communication from a random editor, saying something along the lines of "Welcome to Wikipedia! Good to see you wanting to experiment, but may I suggest experimenting on your user page or in our provided sandbox next time." This is the smiling Californian Highway Patrol equivalent of fuck you, buddy, shape up or we tell your next of kin that you resisted arrest.
But we have to stress: this is the kind of vandalism and quick-fix that Wikipedia points to as an example of the "success" of Wikipedia: the fact that obvious morons can be cleaned up almost automatically.
Hiding the spray paint
Things get a little harder to track down if the person who likes fucking with stuff puts some thought behind the vandalism.
One of the classic fallacies of Wikipedia is the belief that directed, smart people will only want to do good things for Wikipedia, so the key is to focus on poor-spelling morons and their obvious trash-tastic activity, since the smarties will take care of themselves.
This falls apart because Wikipedia shoves its hands into so many Butts of Knowledge, providing opportunities for a million biases and agendas to bloom. If you run a site dedicated to, say, freestyle swim competitions, the possible biases and schools of thought (as well as the number of people who would take an interest in the subject) set themselves up pretty quickly; maybe a half-dozen common beliefs make themselves known, the people who give enough of a shit to want to damage the area get found, and the whole place comes under control.
With hundreds of thousands of articles, it's trivial to seem like you're adding information, properly cited to a website, and to be writing insightful paragraphs to an entry, when in face you're just fucking around. Try it today!
Of course, a lot of your trickery will be found out. After all, there's a lot of random eyeballs wandering around, and while a lot of the undoing of other's work by God-Kings is for no good reason, it does occasionally sniff out a vandal.
However, you have every chance of your edits not only being accepted, but becoming fixed. If the article looks finished, wikinerds will resist change to it. Many wikinerds are compelled by their need to have a finished product: even though Wikipedia is and should be a sprawling mess, always growing, some want a "Wikipedia 1.0", a stable, completed version, a poor man's Britannica. Combine this with the fashion for "vandalfighting", which is a means of keeping the encyclopaedia static that many editors use as their main way of contributing, and you have substantial inertia. Now when you say that John Smith was born in 1957, rather than 1959, no one is likely to want to look into it. No one checks facts out: they're all too busy removing "fuck" and pictures of giant cocks from the George W. Bush page. Soon enough, as Wikipedia's content becomes smeared across the interwebnet, even John Smith will start believing he was born in '57.
Deep cover
Of course, we've merely gone from eighth grade to community college; being able to write and spell properly is not respected on Wikipedia as hallmarks of quality and since the site will reject any new ideas like a bad kidney, the semi-intent vandal has to do a little more planning.
This is an important tipping-point in the vandal's lifespan; you can, of course, achieve a level of work into figuring out how to fuck around with Wikipedia to just want to spend that time doing positive work. Why put so much effort into ruining such a great thing, when you could just spend it ascending the ranks and becoming a force of good?
Well, besides the fact that any amount of behind-the-scenes observation shows you what a mushroom farm it is. And how if you do anything that isn't totally in line with the perception of Neutral Point of View, it's destroyed. And how you spend hours creating an informed paragraph into an entry only to have some numbnut 5 timezones away undo it with a one-line dismissal...
OK, where were we.
See also
External links
- Wikipedia "Counter Vandalism Unit" wiki
- Vandalism revert monitoring tool authored by Tony Sidaway (slow response time)
