Hoaxes in France and at university, Wikipedia used in Indian court, Is Wikipedia a cult?, and more

A hoax article on the French Wikipedia made it into international news last week. According to a report in The Times, the article about "Léon-Robert de L'Astran", supposedly a traveller, scholar and shipowner born in 1767 in La Rochelle, stayed on the French Wikipedia for three years and duped many. The most notable victim was Ségolène Royal (the 2007 French presidential candidate for the Socialist Party), who on May 10, the national anti-slavery day, extolled de L'Astran's opposition against slavery in a comment on Facebook (which she removed after realising the hoax). As of June 14, tourists in La Rochelle were still offered to take La Route de L'Astran named after the nonexistent local hero.

The article (which did not cite any sources in the May 9 version that is still available from Google's cache) was based on an invention by a member of the Rotary Club of La Rochelle, according to Sud-Ouest [1]. Outside France, the case was also covered by major newspapers in Austria and Italy.

Jimmy Wales was interviewed on the June 9 episode of The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Tech Therapy" podcast, discussing among other things the use of Wikipedia in education and the importance to teach media competence. Wales described various successful and unsuccessful examples of Wikipedia assignments. At one point (starting around 4:20) he was asked about the Edward Owens hoax, an article that had been written in 2008 by a class at George Mason University at the instruction of history professor T. Mills Kelly, and was picked up by a USA Today blog and other media. (In the headline of an earlier article about the case, the Chronicle had summarized the professor's approach as "Teaching by Lying".) Wales said he had not been aware of the case, and that it was "disappointing [to] hear that it comes from a professor", questioning the ethics of Kelly's teaching method: "To ask students to deliberately hoax Wkipedia is a very bad thing ... If you are in a class to train security guards for banks, you don't send the class out to rob a bank. It could be a learning experience, yes, but it's probably better to say, here's a list of 50 cases of bank robberies that went wrong, let's go through each one ...". In a blog post titled Really? Really, Really?, T. Mills Kelly hit back at "Jimmy", advising him to read the earlier debates about the case (both on his blog and in the deletion discussion), arguing that they "quickly move away from the vandalism-is-annoying oversimplification".

Last week, false rumors about Russell Crowe's death spread on the Internet and briefly made their way into the Wikipedia article about the actor, too. This led RadarOnline [2], the Los Angeles Times [3], Austrian newspaper Der Standard [4] and several user-generated news sites to imply that the hoax had originated on Wikipedia. But according to other sources it had spread on Twitter and elsewhere long before the first such edit that is visible in the article's version history. According to one source, the "Celebrity Fake News Generator" at FakeAWish.com had been used to start the rumor.

According to a report in the Indian newspaper DNA, Wikipedia was recently quoted by a government lawyer before the Bombay High Court, adding to the long list of such usages internationally (see "Wikipedia as a court source").

Tarun Tahiliani is an acclaimed fashion designer in India. Earlier this year, he had claimed an exemption as an artist on his income tax for his design work under section 80 RR of the Indian Income Tax Act. "Artist" is not defined under the Income Tax Act. The income tax department rejected this on the grounds that it does not consider fashion design as a part of the fine arts; its lawyer submitted definitions of the terms "design", "art" and "artist" from Wikipedia to argue that it should instead be regarded as an applied art.

The matter finally went to the Bombay High Court, where judge DY Chandrachud asked, "How reliable is Wikipedia? Isn't it subject to user modification?" The opposing party cited definitions from Webster's dictionary and a Sanskrit text.

Interestingly, Wikipedia's article on fashion design currently defines it as "the art concerned with the application of design and aesthetics to clothing and accessories."

As reported by the Straits Times [5], the Hindustan Times [6] and AsiaOne [7], a Singaporean student of Indian origin has filed a complaint with the police after insulting remarks about himself and a fellow South Korean student were inserted into the Wikipedia article about his school, the Tampines Junior College, on June 11. The school's staff removed them from the article, which is presently semi-protected. The version history of the article lists several deleted revisions added between May 30 and June 11.

In a June 7 InfoWorld article named The High Priests of Wikipedia, Wikipedia was described as one of "Six more tech cults" (the other five being the Slashdot, Singularitarianism, Drupal, OS/2 and open source communities). The article identified the page Wikipedia:FAQ as the cult's "[h]oly scriptures" and Jimmy Wales as its "[p]atron saint". The author Dan Tynan wrote that "[f]or internecine intrigue and power struggles, the Wikipedia makes the Vatican look like a coffee clatch", with administrators as "the Wikipedian equivalent of the College of Cardinals". Tynan cited from an interview he had conducted with writer Sam Vaknin, published recently in Global Politician under the title The Wikipedia Cult (which was also recommended by Larry Sanger, whom Vaknin refers to as "the Wikipedia's real visionary"):

This is not an informal network: It is completely rigid with a hierarchy, titles, job descriptions, remits, and responsibilities.

Tynan introduced Vaknin as "author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited and other books about personality disorders." Snopes has noted that "Dr. Vaknin is careful to include a disclaimer on his web site stating that he is 'NOT a mental health professional' (his CV lists a doctorate in philosophy from the unaccredited Pacific Western University)".

In 2006, after an article about Vaknin had been deleted and User:Samvak had been blocked (for sockpuppet activities involving the article Narcissistic personality disorder and other topics related to Vaknin's work), Global Politician had published an earlier article by Vaknin that was critical of Wikipedia: The Six Sins of the Wikipedia (see also a rebuttal by Ta bu shi da yu). In 2007, Global Politician published Vaknin's article Wikipedia - Can Teenagers Write An Encyclopedia?. In a January 2010 article on the same website, titled Positioning the Encyclopedia Britannica (see Signpost coverage), Vaknin granted that although "the data are riddled with errors and do not amount to structured knowledge ... Wikipedia-like online efforts are more than adequate for the needs of the vast majority of users", advising Britannica to cooperate with Wikipedia and "to study and emulate" the model of Citizendium.

Tynan's recent article and interview quoted Vaknin as saying:

By 2003, the Wikipedia had acquired all the hallmarks of a cult: hierarchy, arcane rules, paranoid insularity, intolerance of dissent, and a cosmic grandiose mission.

Wikipedia researcher Joseph Reagle called the criticism of Wikipedia as a cult "hyperbolic", pointing out that the project did not meet several criteria from cult checklists. He classified Vaknin's criticism as

a wonderful example of the criticism of WP enthusiasm as a cult or religion, many earlier examples of which I describe in my dissertation.

In his 2008 NYU dissertation about Wikipedia,—to appear in book form later this year—Reagle had examined various kinds of Wikipedia criticism and placed them into a centuries old context of encyclopedia criticism, in a chapter called "encyclopedic anxiety"—also the title of a recent conference talk of his (Summary, slides, video; see also Signpost coverage).

Hours before the trial of the "Pending Changes" feature was to start at 11pm UTC Tuesday (see this week's News and notes), media coverage began with articles by the BBC (Wikipedia unlocks divisive pages for editing), the Daily Telegraph (Wikipedia rolls out 'pending changes'), V3.co.uk (Wikipedia modifies editing system for controversial pages) and Network World (Wikipedia to unlock frequently vandalized pages). At that time, it appeared that the Foundation had been relatively successful in its efforts to emphasize the feature's potential for easing existing page protection and to dispel assumptions that it represents a move towards tighter editorial control on Wikipedia (which had dominated media coverage of the proposed trial last August, see Signpost coverage: Misleading media storm over flagged revisions).

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• "here's a list of 50 cases of bank robberies that went wrong, let's go through each one" - this is exactly the way it goes. Not all fifty, but the most notable cases are studied. Titanic, Bhopal, Tenerife, deaths of Kennedy and Rabin etc. are the lessons, and they are indeed studied by students in relevant fields. A bank robbery is not much different from the BP oil spill: these lessons must be studied to be learnt. East of Borschov (talk) 05:51, 16 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • In light of Jimmy's comments (which for once I agree with) I've taken the liberty of moving User:Shii/Hoaxes to Wikipedia:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia, which should indeed prove a helpful reference for students interested in the promulgation of hoaxes on our project. Dcoetzee 23:30, 16 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Is Wikipedia a cult?

Sam Vaknin has published a reply to this Signpost article. I am addressing the relevant part below (the rest of Vaknin's response consists of explanations why he considers himself as a Wikipedia expert superior to Reagle, and a copy of the Signpost article, with links removed). Vaknin's statements are quoted in italic.

In response to Dan Tynan's excellent article about Wikipedia (http://infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/faith-in-numbers-six-more-tech-cults-846?page=0,2), Wikipedia struck back, in an article typically riddled with blatant lies and not so subtle distortions (see the text below).

First, while it is true that Vaknin has had many fights with Wikipedians in the past, none of those users has been involved in writing this Signpost article. His name came up recently as one of the many writers/commenters about Wikipedia (notable or less so) whose publications we review each week for coverage in the Signpost's "In the news" section.

If a Signpost article is demonstrated to contain a factual inaccuracy, we are happy to note a correction. However, Vaknin's response does not contain a convincing demonstration of such inaccuracies, as shown below. By the way, even Larry Sanger seems to have reservations about the quality of Vaknin's response.

Two examples:

1. The Wikipedia article about me was deleted only after I threatened to initiate a class action lawsuit against Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and Wikimedia. Immediately afterwards, I was removed as a user. To this very day, no one can add an article about "Sam Vaknin" to Wikipedia. Try it!

• According to the deletion log, the article was first deleted on 15:08, 15 February 2006 as a result of a deletion debate that lasted nine days and does not contain any evidence that legal pressure by Vaknin or interference by Wikimedia staff had played a role in its outcome. The article was later recreated, and deleted again on 27 June 2006 (reason given: "This was already decided to be deleted. Gone."), inserted again and last deleted on 3 July 2006 (reason given: "This was on AFD, and it got deleted!!!! DON'T RECREATE!!!!"). From this, is appears that the protection against recreation that Vaknin mentions was to enforce the result of the February 2006 AfD - not out of fear of a "class action lawsuit". Here, the deleting admin explicitly denies that he was even aware of Vaknin's legal threats. (Some other of Vaknin's claims are also rebutted there, such as those about his involvement in Nupedia.)
• According to the block log, User:Samvak was first blocked on 23 June 2006 for sockpuppeting, for one week, which was extended by one week on June 28, followed by an indefinite block on 13 August 2006.
• Vaknin's article The Six Sins of the Wikipedia was published on June 26, 2006, three days after his first block, while Vaknin was still prohibited from editing Wikipedia.

In summary, the data in the logs and on the Global Politician's site fully supports the statement in the Signpost article that Sam Vaknin tries to portray as "lie" or "distortion": "In 2006, after an article about Vaknin had been deleted and User:Samvak had been blocked (for sockpuppet activities involving the article Narcissistic personality disorder and other topics related to Vaknin's work), Global Politician had published an earlier article by Vaknin that was critical of Wikipedia: The Six Sins of the Wikipedia".

2. The Wikipedians - leveraging the Wikipedia's ubiquity and Google ranking - are the one's who started the libelous campaign against me, claiming that my Ph.D. is of the diploma-mill variety. The truth? http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/rebuttal.html

I don't know who first questioned the provenance of Vaknin's doctorate. It is true that doubts about his academic credentials played a role in the February 2006 deletion discussion. But the Signpost article did not cite any such opinions of Wikipedians, instead it just quoted one sentence from an article by Snopes. Snopes has a very good reputation about factual accuracy.

In his "rebuttal", Vaknin tries to create the impression that this is based on a confusion between Pacific Western University (Hawaii) and a legitimate university of the same name in California ("I studied in 1982-3 in ENCINO, California. ... I have never been to Hawaii, let alone studied there"). However, the Snopes article is not talking about PWU (Hawaii), but about Pacific Western University (California) (it links to this draft which makes clear that the PWU that was based in Encino is the same as the one later based in San Diego). For more context about the former Pacific Western University based in San Diego, see Pacific_Western_University#Controversies_prior_to_2006 and the links there, especially this article by Inside Higher Ed or this article by The Scientist on a 2005 scandal about a Ph.D. title from PWU (California), i.e. a Ph.D. title such as Vaknin's .

Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:05, 19 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

French politician falls for Wikipedia hoax

Since the publication of this Signpost article, the tourist tour "La Route de L'Astran" in [8] has been renamed "La Route de L'Ocean", and the following text has been removed:

"Léon Robert de L’Astran, représente bien sa ville natale, La Rochelle dite « La rebelle ». Marin, naturaliste, savant, il effectua plusieurs voyages aux Amériques dont un avec La Fayette, à bord de la Frégate Hermione. Grand humaniste, il s'opposa fermement à la traite des noirs et refusa que les navires dont il avait hérité de son père soient utilisés pour cela."

The old version can still be seen in Google's cache.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 07:17, 21 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]