[WikiEN-l] Story about Wikipedia response to subtle vandalism

Sun Oct 29 10:19:02 UTC 2006

Phil Sandifer wrote

> Unfortunately, the Chronicle article goes on to state that the  
> Halavais added, as an anon, an article on communication theory within  
> his area of expertise, and it was swiftly gutted.
> 
> Sadly, that article isn't mentioned, making it harder to identify  
> what went wrong there. But we ought take caution, once again, about  
> [[WP:BITE]] - the anecdote of "I corrected this information but it  
> got changed back to wrong" or "I contributed an article on topic X  
> that I'm a clear expert on but it got gutted"  is getting too common.

Quoting the piece:

'Shortly after Mr. Halavais's career as a troll ended, the professor — this time posting anonymously — contributed another article to Wikipedia, a piece on theories of communication, his area of expertise.

"It got shut down pretty quick, and I think there's just a small piece of it left online," he says. "Some other professors I talked to said the same thing happened to them: They were experts in their fields, they wrote something well in their area of expertise, and it got cut up." '

Let's bear in mind that the piece has no clear idea of the difference between a troll and a vandal. The original prank edits were made all of two years ago (2004). This may relate also to 2004, therefore. We can't trust the article to know the difference between anonymous and pseudonymous edits. Under current conditions an anon cannot start such an article.

We also cannot trust the article to know the difference between a serious copy edit and the removal of trustworthy stuff. There may have been existing coverage: many new articles end up redirected or merged. We cannot know whether it was written in encyclopedic style, or was a personal essay/lecture notes style of submission.

In short, besides this being anecdotal and time-expired data, the source seems iffy and the report scanty.

Charles

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