How to create false knowledge

April 19, 2008

Tech Debug recently pointed out a big loophole in Wikipedia’s referencing system.

Here’s how you do it:

  1. Make up a “fact.”
  2. Write your fact on a Wikipedia entry without citing a reference.
  3. Wait for a journalist from some “respectable” news organization to come along and mention your fact in a publication.
  4. Edit the Wikipedia entry to cite the publication.
  5. Watch as the world reels in confusion.

So this sounds pretty dumb, but apparently it actually happened with Sasha Baron Cohen’s Wikipedia entry (with the Independent being the “respectable” news organization), and now nobody in the world is sure whether or not he had a career in finance before switching to acting.

We probably underestimate how common this is. One little inaccuracy on Wikipedia can reach thousands of readers in a relatively short time. If the misinformed go on to replicate this inaccuracy, then the mistake becomes exceptionally hard to correct.

It appears that philosopher Paul Feyerabend, who advocated an anarchistic view of (scientific) knowledge, has won.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “How to create false knowledge”

  1. Jamie said:

    Apr 20, 08 at 3:41 am

    Well, except it’s been fixed and now wikipedia no longer includes the false info. In the thread someone links to

    “Wikipedia has many rules. Instead of following every rule, it is acceptable to use common sense as you go about editing. Being too wrapped up in rules can cause you to lose perspective, so there are times when it is better to ignore a rule. If you use common sense when editing, you are unlikely to do anything wrong.”

    The common sense in question being that once they learned the newspaper articles sourced wiki, they ceased to be accepted as valid sources.

    I think this is in the general category that wiki requires a significantly larger number of hours to be put in by sensible people with good faith than by the other type of people. Essentially, you’re dealing with very sophisticated vandalism here, and vandalism gets fixed.

    In any case, cool story.

  2. Lantrix said:

    May 04, 08 at 5:04 am

    Thanks for the trackback. The really good thing is that when I got slash dotted, some other Wikipedia editor quickly removed this information from Wikipedia with comments stating that unless Baron Cohen was on record as saying this, then it will be left out of the article.

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