Spanish TV Channels Vandalize Wikipedia

strider2004 writes to tell us that Barrapunto, a Spanish tech news site, has outed two TV stations in Spain, one public and the other private, for engaging in Wikipedia vandalism for the sake of a story. (The link is in Spanish; Google translation here.) The public station introduced falsehoods into the Wikipedia entry for John Lennon; the private one vandalized the Elvis Presley entry. Both stations said they were performing an "experiment" to check the reaction time of Wikipedia. Both articles were promptly corrected by other editors.
Update: 08/19 13:01 GMT by KD : Barrapunto is not affiliated with Slashdot.

So....

[grassy_knoll]

Goofballs add bogus info to Wikipedia; said bogus info is promptly corrected.

This is news?

Another Brick In The Wall

[Vampyre_Dark]

You open what is supposed to be all the world's knowledge combined in a site, except that the policy is to treat it like a public bathroom. That's fine, but why is it news every time someone gets caught taking a shit in it?

It's fine to let people contribute, but most articles need to be locked down when they are completed, and then you submit stuff to be added for peer review or something. There is no reason why 8 year old Johnny needs to be editing the live version of a page on something he knows nothing about.

Is there enough new information on Elvis arriving, that his page needs to be open to live submissions from anyone 24/7/365?

Re:Good Ol' Unreliable WikipediaBS

[InfiniteWisdom]

Just because it's a medium that allows anyone to edit stuff, it doesn't mean adding bogus information isn't vandalism. That's like spraying painting graffiti on a wall isn't vandalism because paint sticks to the wall.

Re:Another Brick In The Wall

[abhi_beckert]

The problem is if 8 year old Johnny can't edit the page, he won't bother. Anyone can fix a typo, but if it's too much work they won't do it.

The openness is the reason wikipedia succeeded. Not because being open gives better content, but because being open gives more content, and more content makes it valuable to more people, and being valuable to more people gives them more editors, and more editors usually gives better content.

Also, you're forgetting: any page with regular vandalism does get locked down.

Re:The experiment was already done before

[belmolis]

Maybe the Colbert Report is not on Spanish TV?

Re:Lost in Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to add some salt and pepper to a boring story (read: to increase tv share), they described Wikipedia as "a free encyclopedia, so much free that you can freely alter it at will", and then a so-called "expert" (read: a girl who had no idea about how this whole thing works, but oh-oh, she's just sooo cute!) happily showed everybody how to vandalize an article. She demonstrated how easy it was by introducing some odd junk in Lennon's article regarding Spanish "paella". However, she added it was "easy" to get that fixed.

All in all, why's this crap even getting any attention? They're stupid, ok, so what? Come on...

Re:Good Ol' Unreliable WikipediaBS

[ta bu shi da yu]

Then perceptions != reality. It was never OK.

Re:Another Brick In The Wall

[init100]

It's fine to let people contribute, but most articles need to be locked down when they are completed

How would you define completed? Very few articles can claim to contain every piece of knowledge about the subject. There is always room for more, so locking down anything permanently would be a horribly bad idea.

Why the outrage?

[jparker]

Most of the comments so far seem very upset that the TV channels did this, but it really doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Wikipedia is a community, a society like any other. It has its values, with accuracy being one of the most important, and someone did a social experiment to see how well that community adhered to its principles. Sure, it required being a little bit of a bad actor, but if Slashdot reported on a new study where researchers bumped into people while carrying several packages and found that Linux users were more likely to help them pick up their dropped items, I don't think the comments would be blasting them for assault.

This was minor public vandalism, of a kind the community sees every day, and a kind that it was built to correct. If they had launched a systematic campaign to spread disinformation throughout many articles, that would be a serious problem, but changing the date of Lennon's death to 2007 instead of 1977? If edits like that caused Wikipedia any kind of damage, it would have died years ago.

Fast corrections is a bogus myth!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am unimpressed by the fanboys' constant claims of Wikipedia being corrected immediately. How about articles "guarded" by gonzo editors claiming ultimate knowledge, disregarding experts? Huh?

OK, how about Van Allen radiation belt [wikipedia.org] where fast editing has prevented corrections? Evidently the fanboys feel NASA is in the wrong, original research perhaps?? As this talk entry shows [wikipedia.org] a glaring mistake has been known for over a year but noone can do anything about it.

I am sick and tired of these stories claiming Wikipedia editors are that good. Rather I see these editors as the direct descendants of the mob that burned the Library of Alexandria.

Re:Why the outrage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Wikipedia vandals are usually bored 12-year-old children who are not yet well behaved. Responsible adults should know better and should be subject to harsh criticism by their peers (if not legal repercussions) if they cannot follow the rules of civil society.