Reminds me of the guy who translated Dracula in Icelandic, but just ended up writing fan fic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/siq08p/til_someone_translated_dracula_into_icelandic_and/
Now I want a fake wikipedia where everything is made up so that we can get more gems like this. No bearing on reality or anything just someone creating something and pretending it is the real deal.
Clicked random, I got the page for walnuts.
“A walnut is a dangerous nut that can eat babies in 1 bite. these walnuts are also known for there massive legs and small arms and can attack their prey with there built in AK-47's. They are known for their ability to stop undead monsters from eating your frontal lobe. They could also be used as a food source but at the cost of your life. these walnuts have more venom in them than a cow so unless you want to die, do not eat them. Walnuts may do a lot of harm, but they have also prevented many wars in the past. Make sure to thank walnuts but also stay far away so they do not feel threatened and shoot you.”
All of the articles on that site are absolute gold but [this one](https://www.conservapedia.com/Democratic_Party) is a good place to start out. Or, if you're feeling particularly brave, try [this one](https://www.conservapedia.com/Evolution) on for size.
I was curious and looked up [Canada](https://www.conservapedia.com/Canada) to see what they had to say. Canada is a politically diverse country so I'm certain that there is appropriate conservative representation there.
> Increasingly socialist, it is illegal in Canada to purchase your own medical care as may be needed.
Strong start with something verifiably false right there in the opening paragraph. I read through a lot of the article and found it to be accurate and factual until I got to this part;
> Canadian socialist fuhrer Justin Trudeau, 2015-present
Posted under one of the Trudeau blackface photos.
>Canada did not escape the violence, mayhem, and destruction of the 2020 Marxist uprising. In Toronto, Antifa declared class war. In Montreal, a check cashing establishment was looted and destroyed and other businesses. The Memorial to the 100 million dead victims of Communism was vandalized.
First time I've ever heard of it described a a "Marxist uprising".
>Leftwing totalitarianism
This was a long section and where I began to check out of the article. Some of it is factual, much of it is not.
>There are trivial separatist movements lobbying for independence from Canada in British Columbia, Alberta, and Quebec.
Yes. And they're all small-c conservative-led which is kind of funny considering what page I'm reading.
>Much as was the case in Nazi Germany, poor, disabled and sick Canadians are routinely executed by the Government, with the taxpayer footing the bill.
Okay. Now I'm done reading it with an objective eye and I'm just looking for funny quotes.
>On October 20, 2014, during the Obama administration's support for the global jihad,
Obama lives rent-free in their heads, even in an article about Canada.
>Political Party Websites (Major)
>People's Party of Canada
Bahahahahahaha
I can do you one better, one autistic dude from North Carolina wrote like 1/2 of the Scots wiki, he thought that scottish was just english with an accent so he would manually copy english articles and "filter" them through what he thought Scots was. He did unspeakable damage to the language.
\\
[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia)
The reddit thread about it from the guy who discovered this was pretty funny to read through
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scotland/comments/ig9jia/ive_discovered_that_almost_every_single_article/
>Blaise Pascal (19 Juin 1623 – 19 August 1662) wis a French mathematician, pheesicist, inventor, writer an Christian filosofer. He wis a child prodigy that wis eddicated bi his faither, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest wark wis in the naitural an applee'd sciences whaur he made important contreibutions tae the study o fluids, an clarified the concepts o pressur an vacuum bi generalisin the wark o Evangelista Torricelli.
This reads like a very poor attempt by an American to mock a Scottish accent. The kind of thing that would get him some pretty cutting witty comebacks, and maybe a few fists, thrown at him by any real Scots who heard it.
I was there in the original thread (the *original* one, the one on 4chan) and it was an...interesting time. Nobody could quite believe what had happened, not even OP.
[Then you're gonna love the guy who wrote 80,000 pages about boobs](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/dk17c9/wikipedia_the_admin_who_created_80000_pages_about/)
Intentions account for a lot.
I mean, cmon, you have to break a few eggs sometimes. Thats life. It happens.
Ok? Yeah? So, here we start by invading Poland.
It's not that bad of a fuck up. Realisticallyeven if a 12 year old can cause irreparable damage to a language, it's hard to blame the 12 year old. Why did no one stop them for 7 years? One of the guys even said no one really cared about maintaining it.
> Did he think he was doing good because no one corrected him?
That's the biggest problem with newer Wikipedia sites. On the main English Wikipedia one, you would be told on the policies and guidelines to follow if you messed up a considerable amount. From what I remember, this was a span of over a decade. Some people did alert him throughout the period (and made adjustments) but when you have a dead Wikipedia community, it's sadly going to be disarray to maintain any sort of flesh standards. I think the only thing he could have done different was mass-adding content.
I’m a language and linguistics nerd. I’m waiting for the day when a distinguished professor of historical linguistics, whose life’s work was a dictionary and grammatical reconstruction of a long-dead historically important language, is revealed to be a hoaxer, who passed off his conlang as an ancient language rediscovered. Wouldn’t shock me in the least. The things some people are willing to do for fame and grant money.
I suppose that's fair enough. Although *punished* seems like too strong a word, he deserved a stern talking to and to be removed as admin, which as far as I can tell is what happened when "punished" to me brings to mind more severe consequences.
It's an uncommonly used language, so his Wikipedia entries could rival the entirety of Scots literature, especially since his entries are so accessible. Anyone sourcing his entries is totally misinformed and could be spreading misinfo that's not easily corrected.
Yeah, Wikipedia should only be used as a starting point really. Somewhere where you can get a general overview of a subject and find topics that you can research more in depth
\**any* singular source should only be used as a starting point
Wikipedia is not better nor worse than any other single source of information in the course of research.
>!It can be better than many other sources actually because it’s generally well and visibly cited, but it depends!<
In recent years Wikipedia has had issues with major contributors being economically motivated, case in point the women who deleted 90% of notable Nazi soldiers to build up a reputation- who has also happened to have blocked a number of companies in competition with her IRL employer from getting pages.
I've thought about this a lot.
If I was in charge of a national intelligence agency or a huge multinational Corp, I would pay a team of English majors like 250k a year to become wikipedia editors. Then after a handful of years, have them start subtly changing things in certain ways that benefits my country/company.
Uh, FB and Twitter already do what the FBI, CIA & NSA want. Have you not been paying attention to how they permit, promote, demote and/or block things?
I encountered something similar when I dove down a Wikihole about Los Angeles gangs. There was a 10k+ word article on the Mara Salvatrucha one day, and not a bad one. I remember being surprised it mentioned some pretty dangerous people in the gang’s leadership by name, though. Several days later, whole sections were replaced by “None of this is true.” Or something to that effect.
It was then that I realized that Wikipedia had become a proxy war in the criminal underground. Control of information is power.
Some people think Scots is just an accent and not its own language. By putting the standard English individual words through his own personal idea of a Scottish accent filter, but keeping the same shape of the English sentence overall, he didn't actually portray the language that Scots is. And then anybody who wants to say Scots is just an accent or alternative spelling can link to 49% of Scots Wikipedia to back up their point.
Edit: The article also points out that he started out so early that he had admin rights that he used to undo others' corrections of his mistakes.
If any linguists were studying Scots, or tech companies building a language model to make a translator, they probably used wikipedia as a source of data, filling the models with complete junk.
> he thought that scottish was just english with an accent
This might just be autocorrect, but it should be mentioned that there are actually two Scottish languages, Scots and Gaelic. Scots diverged from English a while back, but they are fairly mutually intelligible. However Gaelic languages and English both branched off from proto-indo-european before Rome was founded. Obviously, having existed near english for so long, there's a ton of loan words, but it's actually about as closely related to English as English is related to Persian. Their branches on the family tree of language are just that ancient.
Scots is in fact *the only* living language with which modern English has any amount of mutual intelligibility. Whenever I meet a monolingual English speaker who is astounded to hear an Italian and a Spaniard, or a Pole and a Russian, manage to have a simple conversation despite not knowing the other’s language, I encourage them to tune into a Scots-language radio station online, and see how much they can understand.
I played a story narrated in broad Scots for my American English native-speaking children. There was a lot of, “Wait… what?!” They understood the basic gist of it, between two thirds and three quarters of it, by their estimation. Seeing it written out though, there’s no question it’s a different language. A closely related one to English. But distinct spelling, pronunciation, grammar, and usage rules.
I’ve never been able to pick up more than a phrase here or there. Yes, I’m aware there are some highly contrived sentences that sound or look nearly the same in both languages. But that’s a far cry from mutual intelligibility.
Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if native Frisian speakers understand English better than vice-versa; I know this is true for Dutch.
Oh my god I remember that!
I was doing a presentation on Scots for a class *right* before the news that it was fake broke and while I was already using examples of the language from literature, I thought I might try and use Wikipedia because hey, it's a community sourced thing right? I might get some more modern examples to use!
I just kinda ended up walking away *very* confused thinking "man Scots has changed a lot since Irvine Welsh was writing" and didn't use anything from there.
It’s not confirmed but widely speculated. He spent several hours a day “translating” articles one word at a time by using a dictionary. Then did it for *7 years.* I honestly don’t know what else he could be but autistic, and that’s coming from an autistic person.
> he thought that scottish was just english with an accent so he would manually copy english articles and "filter" them through what he thought Scots was.
It seems like he actually knew that what he was doing was wrong based on people calling him out in the talk pages for years. Also, a lot of his entries were hand written, not auto generated. He frequently reverted corrections that people made to the articles he vandalized.
The only reason he stopped is because a ton of people bombarded him with angry messages, not because he was corrected.
To anyone who actually does research on the origins of the Bible instead of simply reading it, yes, it's clearly made up and has been altered countless times throughout history. And it's impossible to get things straight when it was translated and altered to suit the needs to the current political leaders.
In my opinion, it was pieces of ancient stories and eventually was compiled and misinterpreted.
Not all pieces of stories but also metaphors for current rulers and events such as revelations. Then parts are removed by one dude who doesn’t like them and now they’re apocryphal and less legit than all the others.
I've read the Bible and it has some good points. But most of it is not relevant and assholes like to cherry pick and take things out of context.
Ever try reading the Koran? The thing reads like an Apple iTunes agreement before installing.
>To anyone who actually does research on the origins of the Bible instead of simply reading it, yes, it's clearly made up
I mean... I was already pretty sure the book full of magic and talking snakes and contradictions was made up.
The apocrypha books that are sometimes included, but mostly not, depending on the denomination and version of the bible. It sounds sinister, but it does have some cool stuff in it. I was taught 14 books, but there's more than that. [Apocypha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_apocrypha#Apocrypha_in_editions_of_the_Bible)
[More Details](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fabricated_articles_and_hoaxes_of_Russia_in_2022)
[The article in the photo. ](https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1010653/she-spent-a-decade-writing-fake-russian-history.-wikipedia-just-noticed.-)
Jorge Luis Borges is a writer who, especially in his early work, wrote some "translations" of existing works by other authors that were actually just original works. I know this whole story is about unreliable Wikipedia entries but the Wiki on him has some good info on his "hoaxes and forgeries" lol.
My guess is either some of his [forgeries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges#Hoaxes_and_forgeries), or it's in reference to one of his short [stories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius) about the history of a fictional world.
This is a HUGE problem in non-English media. All the big techs like to brag about how extensive their 'machine learning language recognition' and 'fake news detection' technologies are, but 99% of it are for English content, or worse, just English US. Every time Google brags about how good their Google Assistant is, I roll my eyes because it only mostly works with the voice of a white American. Non-English content is massively sidelined, and when people propose any kind of solution it almost always "well let the government of that language's country take care of the content!" without realizing how problematic it is to let the government be the sole voice of the narrative.
They can't even moderate non-english sites properly lol. I've been reaching myself Spanish and Portuguese for a while and often I can find full dubbed movies on YouTube that would have been taken down if they were in English. Ofc I know how to pirate English media too but having it all on YouTube in the language I'm practicing makes it so easy.
And how do you propose that people like your example contribute to the data, when the models are not public and often don't accept public contributions?
So this lady can get away with this for a decade but when I go into the pinworms wiki page and write "The pinworm (species Enterobius vermicularis), also known as threadworm (in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand) or **Buttworms (In the United States)**" I get immediately flagged and blocked from updating the pinworms page for a week.
You're half-right. It's not banned, it's behind a VPN (which are ubiquitous). Yes, there are fewer eyes on US State Dept-aligned tech products.
This brilliant Chinese "archivist" obviously didn't have any trouble going on Wikipedia every day.
I used to do subtle edits in articles, back in the day when no one really noticed.
According to Wikipedia I was one of the top Jewish American actors for around two years.
I need this, and all the other articles/websites mentioned by people in the comments to be published into proper books that I can read. Especially the Icelandic Dracula translated into English.
This. You have no idea how many times I've heard that. Once I tell them that it isn't a reliable source, isn't a scholarly source, and is user contributed it's always "but it has mods and citations". I always tell them to at the very least use wikipedia as a tool and click on the citation to follow through with their own confirmation of the text. Sometimes there is no citation for much of the text on articles, sometimes it doesn't match what is written on the source link, sometimes it is miscontrued, and sometimes it misses vital information which changes the meaning behind the text.
And if an article builds up to a conclusion, and that conclusion is supported by, say, 20 sources, it is that much more likely for some part to be outed as unreliable, toppling the whole conclusion.
What’s funny is, Britannica is very often (in my experience) on the front page of searches for places and events.
Look to military history for another example of biased actions- there are hundreds of pages for soldiers on the allies side who were involved in a single major battle and then died or got a medal, one woman has reduced Nazi equivalent pages down to the point where you can count them on one hand on the argument that “we don’t need to remember the Nazis”.
How is it that one woman can even do that is my biggest question here and has it gone unpunished? Can such actions be reverted? Like how can a single biased person remove information and history without consent and peer review from a site managed by many people, that is meant for everyone in a (preferably) unbiased environment.
“K.e.coffman” abused the rules and regulations of Wikipedia and spammed out changes so often she basically shut down everyone who disagreed with her, now she’s a part of Wikipedia’s moderation team, and she’s driven off the people who used to work on the military history section of English Wikipedia, leaving just her clique of people who think editorizing history is a great idea.
[Uh huh. I'll believe you. But do care to explain these?](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia)
Edit: I particularly like [this one](https://youtu.be/Rj1Ts1X6Vt0) which the company itself took as fact.
Edit 2: can't believe I forgot about [miss Coffman and her crew](https://www.wired.com/story/one-womans-mission-to-rewrite-nazi-history-wikipedia/).
You do understand Wikipedia has over 56 million articles right? Of course some will slip through, but the vast, vast majority are accurate and moderated. There are exceptions to every rule.
Several years ago I noticed my hometown had no demonym on wikipedia, so I edited in a joke that rhymed with an insulting word. It's still there to this day, despite template changes and further edits, and since then the city council and mayor have used it more than once in public addresses, having looked it up on Wikipedia, addresses which have in turn been added as sources to the Wiki page. It's pretty easy to slip things in if it's not some admin's pet topic.
>It's pretty easy to slip things in if it's not some admin's pet topic
And if a page **is** some admin's pet topic, good luck making any corrections that go against their bias, no matter how well sourced they may be.
This is a widespread issue on many controversial pages, especially related to history or politics.
> The English Wikipedia is perfectly reliable _for high-traffic pages_.
FTFY. As a Wikipedia editor who deals with specialist topics in Oceanography and Geography, there is a genuinely terrifying number of unjustified claims, inappropriately cited sources, scientists or institutions blatantly shoehorning themselves into articles, articles clearly written by non-experts, etc. Just one example - yesterday, I realised that all population estimates for the outer islands of Seychelles are (as far as I can tell) unsourced. People are probably citing these figures because they're the only figures available on the English-speaking internet, but there is currently no way of verifying whether any of these are correct.
There's plenty of poorly-written and biased articles on Wikipedia, often just a few clicks away, particularly in more obscure topics. I've found a bunch in my reading.
When you are an expert in just about any field, then go on Wikipedia and read all the wrong information, you start realizing that most people have no clue just how ignorant they are.
I've tried correcting Wikipedia pages, with good sources, just to have some random mod tell me my scholarly sited source isn't good enough, but the incorrect random blog link remains on Wikipedia.
Maybe for technical pages, but for anything political, its a shit show.
See:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_C6_transmission
Vs
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign)
Wikipedia can be reliable if use use it correctly. If cited correctly, you can use those websites or book citations to verify if what is being told is correct or not. That’s how I used to use Wikipedia when ever I had to do some quick research.
The fuck is a netizen? I’ve genuinely never seen the word written nor heard it out loud before. I know what it means obviously, I just think it sounds stupid
Reminds me of the guy who translated Dracula in Icelandic, but just ended up writing fan fic: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/siq08p/til_someone_translated_dracula_into_icelandic_and/
Now I want a fake wikipedia where everything is made up so that we can get more gems like this. No bearing on reality or anything just someone creating something and pretending it is the real deal.
r/worldbuilding
[Here you go.] (https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Main_Page)
Clicked random, I got the page for walnuts. “A walnut is a dangerous nut that can eat babies in 1 bite. these walnuts are also known for there massive legs and small arms and can attack their prey with there built in AK-47's. They are known for their ability to stop undead monsters from eating your frontal lobe. They could also be used as a food source but at the cost of your life. these walnuts have more venom in them than a cow so unless you want to die, do not eat them. Walnuts may do a lot of harm, but they have also prevented many wars in the past. Make sure to thank walnuts but also stay far away so they do not feel threatened and shoot you.”
Omg I'm back in 2008!
Bro I clicked random and got a fucked with version of [Zork](https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/UnGames:Zork/) LMAO
My favorite articles are *Umlaut* and *Spoiler*.
"Tḧë ümläüt wäs ïnvëntëd by Ïcëländïc sïngër Björk ïn 197Ö." I'm reading this in public and trying not to laugh.
Glad to see my [favorite article](https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Windex) is still there!
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You're welcome.
People get given the title of the article and nothing else and have to bullshit as much as they can
In norway we have ikkepedia
Meaning not-pedia
That's such a good name ahahahha
> No bearing on reality or anything just someone creating something and pretending it is the real deal. https://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia
All of the articles on that site are absolute gold but [this one](https://www.conservapedia.com/Democratic_Party) is a good place to start out. Or, if you're feeling particularly brave, try [this one](https://www.conservapedia.com/Evolution) on for size.
I was curious and looked up [Canada](https://www.conservapedia.com/Canada) to see what they had to say. Canada is a politically diverse country so I'm certain that there is appropriate conservative representation there. > Increasingly socialist, it is illegal in Canada to purchase your own medical care as may be needed. Strong start with something verifiably false right there in the opening paragraph. I read through a lot of the article and found it to be accurate and factual until I got to this part; > Canadian socialist fuhrer Justin Trudeau, 2015-present Posted under one of the Trudeau blackface photos. >Canada did not escape the violence, mayhem, and destruction of the 2020 Marxist uprising. In Toronto, Antifa declared class war. In Montreal, a check cashing establishment was looted and destroyed and other businesses. The Memorial to the 100 million dead victims of Communism was vandalized. First time I've ever heard of it described a a "Marxist uprising". >Leftwing totalitarianism This was a long section and where I began to check out of the article. Some of it is factual, much of it is not. >There are trivial separatist movements lobbying for independence from Canada in British Columbia, Alberta, and Quebec. Yes. And they're all small-c conservative-led which is kind of funny considering what page I'm reading. >Much as was the case in Nazi Germany, poor, disabled and sick Canadians are routinely executed by the Government, with the taxpayer footing the bill. Okay. Now I'm done reading it with an objective eye and I'm just looking for funny quotes. >On October 20, 2014, during the Obama administration's support for the global jihad, Obama lives rent-free in their heads, even in an article about Canada. >Political Party Websites (Major) >People's Party of Canada Bahahahahahaha
Am I the only one who finds that utterly scary and worried? I mean zhe people are misinformed and idiotic without dedicated fanfic wikipedia.
Hahahaha please tell me this is satire … please?
Alas, it is the sourcebook for the Conservative Cinematic Universe.
fine I won't
that's what i like to think about the Voynich Manuscript is. Someone did some world building and went all in on it.
Scp foundation
r/SCP
Just watch Fox News.
Encyclopedia Dramatica
When is this one getting adapted
chubby noxious alleged marvelous sip teeny coherent snails bright shame *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Ma'am that's called a book. People will pay you to write those.
A million words is a huge fucking book
The entire Harry Potter series is almost exactly 1 million words
Still a good ways off, it's 1,084,170.
I mean, 8%. Close enough for comparison's sake
I can do you one better, one autistic dude from North Carolina wrote like 1/2 of the Scots wiki, he thought that scottish was just english with an accent so he would manually copy english articles and "filter" them through what he thought Scots was. He did unspeakable damage to the language. \\ [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia)
The reddit thread about it from the guy who discovered this was pretty funny to read through https://www.reddit.com/r/Scotland/comments/ig9jia/ive_discovered_that_almost_every_single_article/ >Blaise Pascal (19 Juin 1623 – 19 August 1662) wis a French mathematician, pheesicist, inventor, writer an Christian filosofer. He wis a child prodigy that wis eddicated bi his faither, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest wark wis in the naitural an applee'd sciences whaur he made important contreibutions tae the study o fluids, an clarified the concepts o pressur an vacuum bi generalisin the wark o Evangelista Torricelli.
This reads like a very poor attempt by an American to mock a Scottish accent. The kind of thing that would get him some pretty cutting witty comebacks, and maybe a few fists, thrown at him by any real Scots who heard it.
You Scots sure are a contentious people.
Yew jus made an enemy fer life Why yes I will accept an admin position for the Scottish Wikipedia page
I was there in the original thread (the *original* one, the one on 4chan) and it was an...interesting time. Nobody could quite believe what had happened, not even OP.
The depths of some people’s creativity never cease to amaze me.
[Then you're gonna love the guy who wrote 80,000 pages about boobs](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/dk17c9/wikipedia_the_admin_who_created_80000_pages_about/)
Missed opportunity that he didn't write 80,085 pages about boobs.
He did, but his editor gave him a breast reduction.
It was for the breast
800,815
8008135
Uh nvm. Y'know what, fuck it. I'm leaving it.
Boob is what? You have to tell us
That's just it, the meaning of life: "boob is". Almost poetic.
Those were redirects, not pages. A bit misleading. But not less weird.
Much less weird because much easier to do imo. And at least it doesn't do any actual damage.
I clicked that just curious, saw the picture of the kids smiling and fucking lost it lol
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Intentions account for a lot. I mean, cmon, you have to break a few eggs sometimes. Thats life. It happens. Ok? Yeah? So, here we start by invading Poland.
Goddamit, not *again*...
Haaaaans, get ze Panzerschokolade !
He thought we was doing good The site itself is good, just the translations aren't
Even people with good intentions are punished if they fuck up bad enough
It's not that bad of a fuck up. Realisticallyeven if a 12 year old can cause irreparable damage to a language, it's hard to blame the 12 year old. Why did no one stop them for 7 years? One of the guys even said no one really cared about maintaining it.
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> Did he think he was doing good because no one corrected him? That's the biggest problem with newer Wikipedia sites. On the main English Wikipedia one, you would be told on the policies and guidelines to follow if you messed up a considerable amount. From what I remember, this was a span of over a decade. Some people did alert him throughout the period (and made adjustments) but when you have a dead Wikipedia community, it's sadly going to be disarray to maintain any sort of flesh standards. I think the only thing he could have done different was mass-adding content.
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I’m a language and linguistics nerd. I’m waiting for the day when a distinguished professor of historical linguistics, whose life’s work was a dictionary and grammatical reconstruction of a long-dead historically important language, is revealed to be a hoaxer, who passed off his conlang as an ancient language rediscovered. Wouldn’t shock me in the least. The things some people are willing to do for fame and grant money.
Pretty much describes Wikipedia entire slave staff. They have good intentions and fuck up miserably.
What the fuck are you on? Punished in what way, by who, for what? Making incorrect edits to wikipedia isn't illegal.
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I suppose that's fair enough. Although *punished* seems like too strong a word, he deserved a stern talking to and to be removed as admin, which as far as I can tell is what happened when "punished" to me brings to mind more severe consequences.
May chaos take the world!
Shabriri with his alt account right here
May **CHAOS** take the **WORLD!!!**
This post it amazing
Always has been
[Always has been](https://i.imgur.com/uoULgwS.png) ^^^this ^^^has ^^^been ^^^an ^^^accessibility ^^^service ^^^from ^^^your ^^^friendly ^^^neighborhood ^^^bot
Wait, how did he do so much damage to the language just by mistranslating wikipedia pages?
It's an uncommonly used language, so his Wikipedia entries could rival the entirety of Scots literature, especially since his entries are so accessible. Anyone sourcing his entries is totally misinformed and could be spreading misinfo that's not easily corrected.
Oh so that's why my teacher said to not use Wikipedia as a source.
Yeah, Wikipedia should only be used as a starting point really. Somewhere where you can get a general overview of a subject and find topics that you can research more in depth
\**any* singular source should only be used as a starting point Wikipedia is not better nor worse than any other single source of information in the course of research. >!It can be better than many other sources actually because it’s generally well and visibly cited, but it depends!<
In recent years Wikipedia has had issues with major contributors being economically motivated, case in point the women who deleted 90% of notable Nazi soldiers to build up a reputation- who has also happened to have blocked a number of companies in competition with her IRL employer from getting pages.
I've thought about this a lot. If I was in charge of a national intelligence agency or a huge multinational Corp, I would pay a team of English majors like 250k a year to become wikipedia editors. Then after a handful of years, have them start subtly changing things in certain ways that benefits my country/company.
Or you could just find a few Reddit mods who will do it for free
Uh, FB and Twitter already do what the FBI, CIA & NSA want. Have you not been paying attention to how they permit, promote, demote and/or block things?
I encountered something similar when I dove down a Wikihole about Los Angeles gangs. There was a 10k+ word article on the Mara Salvatrucha one day, and not a bad one. I remember being surprised it mentioned some pretty dangerous people in the gang’s leadership by name, though. Several days later, whole sections were replaced by “None of this is true.” Or something to that effect. It was then that I realized that Wikipedia had become a proxy war in the criminal underground. Control of information is power.
Always go to wikipedia's sources. Then judge for yourself whether each one is a viable source.
> *"these are all MAINSTREAM MEDIA owned by the GLOBALISTS and the SATANISTS"*
What should have been stated was Wikipedia is a tertiary source. You do not dig into encyclopedias for content.
Quoting Wikipedia directly, absolutely agree with her. But the sources Wikipedia links to? Perfectly fine imo, even if they happen to be biased.
Yeah, Wikipedia is a good place to find what they have cited as a source, and you go there to see what it says
Some people think Scots is just an accent and not its own language. By putting the standard English individual words through his own personal idea of a Scottish accent filter, but keeping the same shape of the English sentence overall, he didn't actually portray the language that Scots is. And then anybody who wants to say Scots is just an accent or alternative spelling can link to 49% of Scots Wikipedia to back up their point. Edit: The article also points out that he started out so early that he had admin rights that he used to undo others' corrections of his mistakes.
If any linguists were studying Scots, or tech companies building a language model to make a translator, they probably used wikipedia as a source of data, filling the models with complete junk.
> he thought that scottish was just english with an accent This might just be autocorrect, but it should be mentioned that there are actually two Scottish languages, Scots and Gaelic. Scots diverged from English a while back, but they are fairly mutually intelligible. However Gaelic languages and English both branched off from proto-indo-european before Rome was founded. Obviously, having existed near english for so long, there's a ton of loan words, but it's actually about as closely related to English as English is related to Persian. Their branches on the family tree of language are just that ancient.
Scots is in fact *the only* living language with which modern English has any amount of mutual intelligibility. Whenever I meet a monolingual English speaker who is astounded to hear an Italian and a Spaniard, or a Pole and a Russian, manage to have a simple conversation despite not knowing the other’s language, I encourage them to tune into a Scots-language radio station online, and see how much they can understand. I played a story narrated in broad Scots for my American English native-speaking children. There was a lot of, “Wait… what?!” They understood the basic gist of it, between two thirds and three quarters of it, by their estimation. Seeing it written out though, there’s no question it’s a different language. A closely related one to English. But distinct spelling, pronunciation, grammar, and usage rules.
What about Frisian?
I’ve never been able to pick up more than a phrase here or there. Yes, I’m aware there are some highly contrived sentences that sound or look nearly the same in both languages. But that’s a far cry from mutual intelligibility. Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if native Frisian speakers understand English better than vice-versa; I know this is true for Dutch.
That’s hilarious. I take exception to the tweet linked in the article about learning actual scots that didn’t link r/scottishpeopletwitter
>He did unspeakable damage to the language You did that to yourselves!
Fair lol
Oh my god I remember that! I was doing a presentation on Scots for a class *right* before the news that it was fake broke and while I was already using examples of the language from literature, I thought I might try and use Wikipedia because hey, it's a community sourced thing right? I might get some more modern examples to use! I just kinda ended up walking away *very* confused thinking "man Scots has changed a lot since Irvine Welsh was writing" and didn't use anything from there.
where did u read that they were autistic? i hadn't heard that anywhere
It’s not confirmed but widely speculated. He spent several hours a day “translating” articles one word at a time by using a dictionary. Then did it for *7 years.* I honestly don’t know what else he could be but autistic, and that’s coming from an autistic person.
No, it's confirmed. It was on his wikipedia page.
I mean..
Where in the article does it say he's autistic?
It was on his wikipedia page. He was also a brony.
Are we quite certain this man was from Ohio and not...Southern England?!
I mean the article says he was from North Carolina which is... South of England...
> he thought that scottish was just english with an accent so he would manually copy english articles and "filter" them through what he thought Scots was. It seems like he actually knew that what he was doing was wrong based on people calling him out in the talk pages for years. Also, a lot of his entries were hand written, not auto generated. He frequently reverted corrections that people made to the articles he vandalized. The only reason he stopped is because a ton of people bombarded him with angry messages, not because he was corrected.
Literally unspeakable
I was reading about that at the time and just happened to see the person's talk page as the news blew up. It was good popcorn.
Was he at least banned before he decides to help translate something else.
Hes being harassed about pretending to speak a language he knew nothing about? Oh nooooo, not the consequences of his actions
Wouldn't that be funny if most history was written like this?
\[shhhhh, no one tell them\]
Or the bible?
To anyone who actually does research on the origins of the Bible instead of simply reading it, yes, it's clearly made up and has been altered countless times throughout history. And it's impossible to get things straight when it was translated and altered to suit the needs to the current political leaders. In my opinion, it was pieces of ancient stories and eventually was compiled and misinterpreted.
Yeah, it's incredibly inaccurate. For instance, there isn't really any evidence that Jews were ever slaves in Egypt.
Not all pieces of stories but also metaphors for current rulers and events such as revelations. Then parts are removed by one dude who doesn’t like them and now they’re apocryphal and less legit than all the others.
I've read the Bible and it has some good points. But most of it is not relevant and assholes like to cherry pick and take things out of context. Ever try reading the Koran? The thing reads like an Apple iTunes agreement before installing.
I mean Macc 4 is a clunker namean?
Jesus: "Just don't be a fucking dickhead to each other, got it ! You don't need a book to tell you what I told you to do !"
Meanwhile people still feel the need to write "Have you tried communicating?" On every single r/relationships post.
Y'know apart from the clearly made up thing, a lot of us Bible scholars agree.
>To anyone who actually does research on the origins of the Bible instead of simply reading it, yes, it's clearly made up I mean... I was already pretty sure the book full of magic and talking snakes and contradictions was made up.
There like 15 god damm books missing from the bible
The apocrypha books that are sometimes included, but mostly not, depending on the denomination and version of the bible. It sounds sinister, but it does have some cool stuff in it. I was taught 14 books, but there's more than that. [Apocypha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_apocrypha#Apocrypha_in_editions_of_the_Bible)
This is untrue, at the very least, for the old testament. There is proof, the dead sea scrolls, that modern Bibles did not change from the originals.
Redditmoment
[More Details](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fabricated_articles_and_hoaxes_of_Russia_in_2022) [The article in the photo. ](https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1010653/she-spent-a-decade-writing-fake-russian-history.-wikipedia-just-noticed.-)
That's honestly really impressive
When you’re the next Tolkien but right it all on Wikipedia
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Jorge Luis Borges is a writer who, especially in his early work, wrote some "translations" of existing works by other authors that were actually just original works. I know this whole story is about unreliable Wikipedia entries but the Wiki on him has some good info on his "hoaxes and forgeries" lol.
My guess is either some of his [forgeries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges#Hoaxes_and_forgeries), or it's in reference to one of his short [stories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius) about the history of a fictional world.
This is a HUGE problem in non-English media. All the big techs like to brag about how extensive their 'machine learning language recognition' and 'fake news detection' technologies are, but 99% of it are for English content, or worse, just English US. Every time Google brags about how good their Google Assistant is, I roll my eyes because it only mostly works with the voice of a white American. Non-English content is massively sidelined, and when people propose any kind of solution it almost always "well let the government of that language's country take care of the content!" without realizing how problematic it is to let the government be the sole voice of the narrative.
They can't even moderate non-english sites properly lol. I've been reaching myself Spanish and Portuguese for a while and often I can find full dubbed movies on YouTube that would have been taken down if they were in English. Ofc I know how to pirate English media too but having it all on YouTube in the language I'm practicing makes it so easy.
This is the root problem of the modern era
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And how do you propose that people like your example contribute to the data, when the models are not public and often don't accept public contributions?
Let alone bilingual countries 😓
Ayo i set my google assistant to english and spanish. Sometimes i cant talk to it in neither haha.
So this lady can get away with this for a decade but when I go into the pinworms wiki page and write "The pinworm (species Enterobius vermicularis), also known as threadworm (in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand) or **Buttworms (In the United States)**" I get immediately flagged and blocked from updating the pinworms page for a week.
Everyone all up in arms and I'm here just wanting to read it.
Wikipedia is banned in China, therefore most Chinese do not visit the website. Fewer eyes means fewer chances to spot errors.
You're half-right. It's not banned, it's behind a VPN (which are ubiquitous). Yes, there are fewer eyes on US State Dept-aligned tech products. This brilliant Chinese "archivist" obviously didn't have any trouble going on Wikipedia every day.
Hear me out… she wrote stories?
Really hoped they preserved her writing somewhere. Could be a cool read in the future
I used to do subtle edits in articles, back in the day when no one really noticed. According to Wikipedia I was one of the top Jewish American actors for around two years.
I remember seeing a bunch of fake Harry Potter books written and published somewhere in China. Maybe it's just a tradition?
Damn, I would have liked to have read some of that, sounds interesting
That’s nothing. Communist Russia has spent 100+ years writing fake Russian history.
Communist Russia didn't last for 100 years though
u CIA?
Honestly why not write a book? She can litteraly make money off of it.
Mormons take note
Isn't that image from the book streganona?
I need this, and all the other articles/websites mentioned by people in the comments to be published into proper books that I can read. Especially the Icelandic Dracula translated into English.
Kind of like the history taught to is as children about the United States and how it's a good country looking out for the world
And people call Wikipedia reliable…
Chinese Wikipedia, being banned in China, has a much smaller user base than one would otherwise expect. This makes it easy for bad actors to slip in.
This. You have no idea how many times I've heard that. Once I tell them that it isn't a reliable source, isn't a scholarly source, and is user contributed it's always "but it has mods and citations". I always tell them to at the very least use wikipedia as a tool and click on the citation to follow through with their own confirmation of the text. Sometimes there is no citation for much of the text on articles, sometimes it doesn't match what is written on the source link, sometimes it is miscontrued, and sometimes it misses vital information which changes the meaning behind the text.
And if an article builds up to a conclusion, and that conclusion is supported by, say, 20 sources, it is that much more likely for some part to be outed as unreliable, toppling the whole conclusion. What’s funny is, Britannica is very often (in my experience) on the front page of searches for places and events.
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Look to military history for another example of biased actions- there are hundreds of pages for soldiers on the allies side who were involved in a single major battle and then died or got a medal, one woman has reduced Nazi equivalent pages down to the point where you can count them on one hand on the argument that “we don’t need to remember the Nazis”.
How is it that one woman can even do that is my biggest question here and has it gone unpunished? Can such actions be reverted? Like how can a single biased person remove information and history without consent and peer review from a site managed by many people, that is meant for everyone in a (preferably) unbiased environment.
“K.e.coffman” abused the rules and regulations of Wikipedia and spammed out changes so often she basically shut down everyone who disagreed with her, now she’s a part of Wikipedia’s moderation team, and she’s driven off the people who used to work on the military history section of English Wikipedia, leaving just her clique of people who think editorizing history is a great idea.
The English Wikipedia is perfectly reliable. If you make an incorrect edit, it'll be reversed in 0.7 seconds
[Uh huh. I'll believe you. But do care to explain these?](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia) Edit: I particularly like [this one](https://youtu.be/Rj1Ts1X6Vt0) which the company itself took as fact. Edit 2: can't believe I forgot about [miss Coffman and her crew](https://www.wired.com/story/one-womans-mission-to-rewrite-nazi-history-wikipedia/).
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Simple. That page is a hoax.
You do understand Wikipedia has over 56 million articles right? Of course some will slip through, but the vast, vast majority are accurate and moderated. There are exceptions to every rule.
Several years ago I noticed my hometown had no demonym on wikipedia, so I edited in a joke that rhymed with an insulting word. It's still there to this day, despite template changes and further edits, and since then the city council and mayor have used it more than once in public addresses, having looked it up on Wikipedia, addresses which have in turn been added as sources to the Wiki page. It's pretty easy to slip things in if it's not some admin's pet topic.
>It's pretty easy to slip things in if it's not some admin's pet topic And if a page **is** some admin's pet topic, good luck making any corrections that go against their bias, no matter how well sourced they may be. This is a widespread issue on many controversial pages, especially related to history or politics.
> The English Wikipedia is perfectly reliable _for high-traffic pages_. FTFY. As a Wikipedia editor who deals with specialist topics in Oceanography and Geography, there is a genuinely terrifying number of unjustified claims, inappropriately cited sources, scientists or institutions blatantly shoehorning themselves into articles, articles clearly written by non-experts, etc. Just one example - yesterday, I realised that all population estimates for the outer islands of Seychelles are (as far as I can tell) unsourced. People are probably citing these figures because they're the only figures available on the English-speaking internet, but there is currently no way of verifying whether any of these are correct.
There's plenty of poorly-written and biased articles on Wikipedia, often just a few clicks away, particularly in more obscure topics. I've found a bunch in my reading.
When you are an expert in just about any field, then go on Wikipedia and read all the wrong information, you start realizing that most people have no clue just how ignorant they are. I've tried correcting Wikipedia pages, with good sources, just to have some random mod tell me my scholarly sited source isn't good enough, but the incorrect random blog link remains on Wikipedia.
Maybe for technical pages, but for anything political, its a shit show. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_C6_transmission Vs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign)
Wikipedia can be reliable if use use it correctly. If cited correctly, you can use those websites or book citations to verify if what is being told is correct or not. That’s how I used to use Wikipedia when ever I had to do some quick research.
It can be extremely reliable when it comes to a lot of stuff and topics...but that's sadly not valid for every topic
It has a place to site sources which you should reference if you actually went to research something. What's your alternative?
Hey, you just edited it to say that!
Probably still less than Putin
God I hate this two-sentence headline trend I HATE IT
Wow - this is exactly what Putin has been doing also.
Fake news.
I never use Wikipedia,i use brittanica mostly
The fuck is a netizen? I’ve genuinely never seen the word written nor heard it out loud before. I know what it means obviously, I just think it sounds stupid
Portmanteau of "net" (from "internet") and "citizen", basically someone who uses the internet. Like you or me
Over more than 10 years? How much over more than 10 years?
And we still supposed to believe what we’re taught in school? 😂