Mostly the article is a list. Wikipedia is good at lists.

The biography is minimal. Critical evaluations are non-existent. The references are pisspoor: all but one are online (including Google news), with a PhD dissertation thrown in at apparent random. And fully a third of the biography (which also contains a meaningless pop culture reference) is taken up with Benedetti’s signing a petition on behalf of Puerto Rican independence. The Puerto Ricans, yes, are fairly organized on Wikipedia.

as for the challenge, I am full of failure and self loathing for not taking up the gauntlet the first time you threw it down. I’ve made an edit to Educational Technology today, and will look for more gaps to fill.

I’m not sure how this fits – but most of the stuff I would contribute would be opinion and/or non-scholarly fluff. I mean, I’ll try to pick up my game, but articles like Learning Object Metadata just don’t deserve attention. Much of the stuff I do is ephemeral and changing, so is harder to distill into something that meets any kind of publication standards…

It would have taken longer for people to figure out, but my wager is that they would have done so before long. It all depends, on a number of factors.

But one thing is that it’s hard to do such hoaxing comprehensively. I remember reading that someone had put in ten or so non-obvious fake edits across a range of articles, and was amazed when they were all fixed within hours. But in fact, there’s nothing too surprising about that. Once an attentive editor catches one such edit, the obvious thing is to look at the contributor’s history, and pretty quickly realize that there’s a pattern.

In other words, if at the same time as your edit to El Señor Presidente, you had made similar changes to a half dozen other articles, my bet is that they would have been reverted within 13 hours and ten minutes, you’d have a caution on your user page, and the jig would be up.

And yes, you could then create another account, but Wikipedia is pretty used to (and good at ferretting out) such sustained attempts at subversion.

Beyond omissions, the other problem with Wikipedia is with its readers. During those thirteen hours, there would have been plenty of readers who would have accepted your edit without question. A good reader of Wikipedia, however, would always look at the edit history and talk page, and see that yours was a recent edit, or (depending on the case) that the article was subject to edit-warring etc.

This is another reason (originally the primary one, in fact) for MMM, of course: to teach students to become good readers, and more generally more astute at assessing sources of all kinds.

As for how omissions are reduced: it’s a mix of everything you mention. And there are some projects devoted to making good such gaps. But in the end, the curse and the blessing of the encyclopedia is that it depends on the enthusiasm of its contributors.

So may I remind you of my long-ago challenge? Who’s to blame for the fact that the pages on Educational Technology, where (irony of ironies) Wikipedia is so lauded, are so horribly bad?

I repeat that challenge here: if you really want to know how Wikipedia works, Brian and you (et. al.) should try to work up an article to “good article” or FA status. It will be eye-opening and enlightening, and also very worthwhile.

Your MMM project is impressive specifically because you’re addressing omissions – it’s relatively easy to modify existing content, but much harder (and more valuable) to contribute new work to fill the gaps. But you also raise the interesting point – what is being used to fill the gaps? Regurgitation of lightweight materials? Valid scholarship? Mindless drivel? MMM shows it’s possible to produce high quality articles to fill gaps with valid scholarship, but also that it requires a significant level of sustained effort. I wonder how many other projects (whether individual or group) are in progress to address other omissions.

I’m not at all surprised that your edit got reverted. If anything, I’d have expected it to have been reverted sooner. This is a Featured Article, so there are a number of people who are no doubt watching it. On the other hand, normally I’d be the first to revert… so I’m pleased that this does indeed show that it’s not simply the “authors” of Featured Articles (or indeed any other articles) who keep tabs on them and try to ensure that they don’t degrade.

One of the things of its being a Featured Article, of course, is that it’s meticulously referenced, and so your adding new information without the appropriate references sticks out. In other articles, not so well-referenced, such vandalism (yes, to use the techical Wikipedia term) might last longer.

But the real problem that Wikipedia suffers is less such hoaxing, than the addition of tendentious material. I.e., material that is not so much wrong as one-sided. Usually, however, there are enough people on the other side of any particular division who will give you a run for your money.

So, yes, on the whole Wikipedia’s self-fixing works pretty well.

Where I would disagree with Brian is if he indeed said that “any errors or omissions … would be fixed by the wikipedia community very quickly” (my emphasis). It is much more difficult to fix omissions. We were trying to do that, in a small way, with the MMM project. But it takes time and resources (and some measure of fanaticism, which is why the pop culture articles do so well). El Señor Presidente is simply one Latin American novel; there are plenty of others whose articles are at best plot summary or regurgitated Cliff’s Notes. See the entry on A Hundred Years of Solitude, for instance.

Regards.

he “trust” concept is interesting; as if people believe in some sort of blind, absolute, all guarantees of “trusted” information. It seems kind of a silly thing to hold onto, up there with the Tooth Fairy, is the Absolute Truth of Information Fairy