The article referred to him being "name dropped into books". I wondered if the article meant "scraped into the awful spambooks that sell Wikipedia content without the copyright notices", but was amused to find out it actually made it into a list of abandoned deities compiled by a serious-sounding professor of philosophy for a book on atheism
http://internet.gawker.com/how-one-man-made-himself-into-an-...
Considering the article was an unsourced stub that seems to have owed its longevity to the fact nobody noticed its existence, that's some impressively comprehensive sloppy research.
I find it a little weird to see Gregory Kohs listed generically as "a prominent Wikipedia critic". In 2007 he tried to start a business where he'd get paid to put articles in Wikipedia:
At the time it was seen as an outrage (in my view correctly so) and promptly banned. Wikipedia has a clear conflict-of-interest policy [1] for good reason. Their most valuable asset is reader trust, and Wikipedia, for all its flaws, has done a reasonably good job of keeping it from being overrun by marketroids.
Yup. Ever since then, Gregory Kohs has been on a scarily obsessive mission to not just criticize Wikipedia, but harass individual Wikipedians. He's been banned from almost all the Wikipedia projects, and in the days when Yahoo Answers was a thing, he got banned from there for using it as a way to SEO-associate hateful words with various Wikipedians and Wikimedia staff. As far as I can tell he still devotes many hours a week to his anti-Wikipedia mission -- pretty much every article anyone writes about Wikipedia, he jumps into the comment threads with ludicrously tendential assertions and distortions, often with multiple sockpuppets.
People don't like to talk about him because it feeds the troll, but after five years of solid effort the guy is now scoring mainstream press hits.
Wikipedia's (lack of) resistance to hoaxes is an issue for concern, and the WMF needs criticism, but Kohs is deranged.
I think paying for writing would be a giant mistake. There's a big psychological difference between working for intrinsic rewards and extrinsic rewards; the former gets you much better work. There's also a huge problem with paying some people and not others; my guess is a lot of volunteers would quit immediately if other people were getting paid for similar work.
I'm not quite clear on where the Wikipedia donation money goes though. But if they have a significant amount left over, they could use it on something worthwhile like fact checking.
Australia is made up of hundreds of indigenous lands and language groups many of which carry sacred knowledge not shared with the broader public. So it's not totally surprising that this hoax survived as long as it did.
To give you a fascinating extent to how varied indigenous lannguage groups of Australia are check out this map. We're not talking dialects/accents here, we're talking unique languages where I've be told in many cases people share very little traditionally language except for possibly some similarities with their direct neighbouring lands.
The situation will only get worse as the number of editors declines, leading to a death spiral where hoaxes, bias and inaccuracy make readers and editors lose faith in the project. The other problem (as noted below) is that it is almost impossible to add new or updated information. Generally, observers blame the community, but, in fact most of the site's problems are symptoms of poor software design. I write more about these problems here: http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/
This is both funny and extremely frightening.
Between this and some links from other HN users, I feel like wikipedia is rapidly losing credibility.
Does anyone have recommendations for any alternatives ?
Personal Anecdote:
I also remember the time, one of my friends in college told me that she purposely added misinformation to Wikipedia the night before a big test to lower the curve.
That was also the moment I was glad I'm didn't do premed in college, those kids were hyper-competitive and unethical.
A friend of mine is a published author. Not massively famous or anything, but he's got a series of four books out, published by an actual publishing house and available to buy across the UK in Waterstones and other physical stores (i.e. not self-published or internet-only).
His page was nominated for deletion a few years ago, and despite protest was deleted. About a year ago I thought I might have another go so another friend and I tried (as a first step) adding a page for the publisher. They've published quite a few books now, and some have been nominated for some quite prestigious literary awards. Not unreasonable one would think.
Within minutes we had someone come along and nominate the page for summary deletion. This person didn't know anything about UK literature, or even what the Booker Prize was, but was very eager to get rid of the page regardless. I looked into what their motivation might be and it seems they were part of a team that effectively exists to get rid of new pages as fast as possible, for any reason they can come up with. They get notified when a new page is made and try to kill it, basically.
Unless you are familiar with all the arcana of wikipedia (my friend was this time) then you have almost no hope of getting past this and getting anything new in.
--edit--
The 'team' I'm referring to is wikipedia's "New Page Patrol". I appreciate it exists to stop spam, hate pages etc from lasting too long, but in my experience the people doing this are over-zealous and far too keen on nominating things for "Speedy Deletion" based on their opinions about notability.
I have anecdotes too! I have recently created a few new articles that were not only not deleted or nominated for deletion, but were immediately improved by helpful, experienced editors.
This has not been my experience recently and it appears I am far from alone. I find wikipedia (the resource) very useful indeed and have a lot of respect for the project and the outcome. I just think the community has problems.
Machine learning will fix this. Currently it's likely the case that more info is entered / updated than editors can handle, but once machine learning systems point them toward "suspect" entries they'll be able to keep up with everything I imagine.
There's a major difference between a deity that people sincerely worshipped and a deity that one guy just made up and nobody ever actually believed in.
Even if you're a hard-core atheist who places Yahweh on the same level as the boogeyman (which describes me pretty well), you should still recognize the cultural significance.
So the only difference is popularity. Religions like Scientology and Mormonism pretty much proved that certain people will believe anything, there's no limit to gullibility.
I'm well aware that this stuff is ultimately all made up. That doesn't change the fact that there's a massive difference between one that's made up and nobody ever took seriously, and one that is or was seriously worshipped by people who sincerely believe it's real.
Yeah, it's totally feasible that some adherent of this religion could've looked up its gods in Wikipedia and now worships this guy for real. Sure, in such case it's a "self-fulfilling prophecy", but it wouldn't be much different from John Frum cult or whatever.
One that I recall was for the Refrigerator entry, which he seemingly innocently updated with a "better quality photo" of his own fridge.
If you examined the photo you'd spot that there was a guitar on one of the shelves[1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Refrigerator&oldid...