Kid creates program that tells the identity of those editing certain wikipedia articles

[jagec]

Originally posted by: TheTony
The most controversial edits discovered via WikiScan's cross referencing can be found here.

I liked this one:

Six days after the sixth Harry Potter book was released, someone on a Republican party computer deleted the entire "Harry Potter" article and replacced it with the sentence, "Snape is the half-blood prince and kills Dumbledore."

 

[otispunkmeyer]

wikipedia is only useful for looking up trivia like stuff on war planes, x-men characters, transformers characters etc. its some times a quick way to find simple calcs like standard deviation.... you know formula's you've kinda forgotten but would recognise the moment you see them.

other than that... its garbage

 

[otispunkmeyer]

at lot of those just seem like banter to me.

guardian saying they sell more than the times, boeing changing their entry to say they are the leading aerospace company instead of one of the leading companies. the FBI one is probably a given, they'd of gotten that changed even if it wasnt a wiki. the rest just seem like mindless insults like "george wanker bush" and other imaginative insults.

 

[Mucho]

I've never trusted Wiki seems they have much more articles on porn stars than on Nobel Prize winners.

 

[Mo0o]

all of the changes were pretty minor in comparison to the validity of the article as a whole. i mean it's like like microsoft changed Apple's page to say they support dog fighting or something

 

[shortylickens]

Originally posted by: James3shin
WIKI is a recess/playground reference at best.

Thats pretty much how I see it.
I think this news is sorta interesting but its not like I ever relied on wikipedia for info.
Anyone who does is setting themselves up for a hard fall. Colleges dont even accept it as a valid reference anymore.

 

[Triumph]

Originally posted by: Mo0o
all of the changes were pretty minor in comparison to the validity of the article as a whole. i mean it's like like microsoft changed Apple's page to say they support dog fighting or something

And who's to say who actually performed the changes? "The NRA", "Apple", "Microsoft," what does that even mean? It probably means an employee of those organizations was bored one day at work and was messing around on the internet.

I for one enjoy Wikipedia. It is great for stuff like 80's cartoon characters, or a quick synopsis of any number of hobby related topics. If you're reading a topic on "Abortion", yeah good luck finding something acccurate. But this week I was reading about the history of Slavic languages. Why would anyone even care to take the time and put false edits into an article like that?

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Originally posted by: mugs

Originally posted by: BoomerD
Last semester I had 2 instructors who promised a ZERO on any paper turned in that used wikipedia as a reference...even if they cited numerous other works...

Good :thumbsup: I've said this so many times here... no matter how reliable Wikipedia is or is not, it is not an acceptable source for a research paper. Sweet criminy, I remember writing a paper in the 6th grade, and the teacher said we could use ONE encyclopedia and we had two have to non-encyclopedia sources, and to get used to that because after the 6th grade we could never use an encyclopedia as a source again. Ever. A research paper should use primary and secondary sources. An encyclopedia article IS essentially a research paper. There is something seriously wrong with our students if they don't understand why Wikipedia should not be used for schoolwork (except to lead you to real sources - feel free to use the bibliography section in an encyclopedia article for the same purpose).

Agreed, I was always taught to use encyclopedia's, and now wikipedia, as starting places to get the general idea of a topic. They aren't sources for a research paper.

 

[TheNewbie]

meh...
I'm not that impressed

 

[MisterJackson]

You mean to tell me people actually try to decieve each other???? What the hell??? I thought we were an evolved species!?!?!

 

[FoBoT]

is this confirmed?

 

[TehMac]

Originally posted by: BoomerD
Last semester I had 2 instructors who promised a ZERO on any paper turned in that used wikipedia as a reference...even if they cited numerous other works...

All my instructors did the same. Except Spanish and P.E.

 

[Gunslinger08]

Scary? You must be part of the tin-foil hat crowd.

 

[Kadarin]

Interesting trivia: wikiscanner.virgil.gr is hosted by the same guy that runs rotten.com:

H:\>ping wikiscanner.virgil.gr

Pinging wikiscanner.virgil.gr [216.218.248.202] with 32 bytes of data:

Control-C
^C
H:\>ping www.rotten.com

Pinging www.rotten.com [216.218.248.145] with 32 bytes of data:

Control-C
^C
H:\>