Vandalism edits fool media and a government, become object of bets

During the past week, vandalism on Wikipedia has sparked errors in the media and an embarrassing error by the South African government. A betting company has introduced odds on which Wikipedia pages will be vandalised next.

False death rumor spreads from Wikipedia article

Lindsay Lohan: very much alive

CBS

reported

Lindsay Lohan

"The history page for the Wikipedia entry indicated that in a period of about 31⁄2 hours Wednesday morning, the date of death for Lohan was entered and deleted more than a dozen times by several different users. At least one of the users was blocked indefinitely from editing articles on the grounds that the user's account was "being used only for vandalism". The celebrity blog Ear Sucker soon published an entry reporting, "Rumor has it that Lindsay Lohan has died, at the young age of only 24 years old." The entry said no "reliable sources, such as TMZ or the L.A. Times" had reported Lohan's death, so "we're going to take it as a rumor, solely until we hear otherwise." The rumor was soon debunked by several entertainment blogs, and never appeared in any mainstream news report. But it garnered enough interest to make "Lindsay Lohan dead" the hottest search trend on Google Wednesday morning."

— No, Lindsay Lohan Is Not Dead, cbs2chicago.com

South African government calls FIFA president a penis

On Thursday, news agencies reported that "the South African government has unwittingly referred to FIFA President Sepp Blatter as a "Bellend"—a popular British slang name for a penis." According to media reports, the mistake was made after the article on Sepp Blatter was vandalised so that Blatter was referred to as "Joseph Sepp Bellend Blatter", which the government thought was his correct name, and repeated the error in a post on their website (screenshot by The Guardian) announcing that Blatter was the recipient of the "Order of The Companions of O R Tambo", one of the country's highest awards, which was presented to him at a gala dinner on July 12 by South African president Jacob Zuma, as reported by the Daily Telegraph [1]. Memeburn.com wrote that

"The South African government most likely took Blatter’s name from his Wikipedia profile, which had been the target of angry fans or pranksters who christened the Fifa president with the derogatory second name. When the error came to light, the government webpage was quickly corrected. Given the term’s English origin, in all likelihood the vandalism emanated from an English fan angry at Blatter’s initial opposition to goal-line technology. England lost to Germany during the World Cup after the referee mistakenly adjudged that the ball had crossed the goal line."

— Nur Bremmen, Wikipedia, SA govt unwittingly call Blatter a penis. memeburn.com

However, further analysis on the article's talk page found that the offending term had not been present in the article in the weeks before the award ceremony. It had once been inserted long before the World Cup, though - as early as July 2009 [2].

It was not the first time that vandalism related to controversial referee decisions at this year's World Cup has received media attention - last month, edits to the article about a Malian referee were covered in several U.S. newspapers (see Signpost coverage).

Bookmaker offers bets on next high-profile vandalism

Also last week, Ireland's largest bookmaker, Paddy Power, started taking bets on which page would be vandalised next. The announcement cited the Blatter case, and named as the favourite, at odds of 4–1, the article on Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, who a Paddy Power spokesman said was "public enemy number one" following the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. "Millions rely on Wikipedia as their trusted source of information so any amendments will be used and viewed across the world by thousands of people," they said, "if someone wants to make a statement then this is a high profile tactic and with Tony upsetting so many Americans he is ... an obvious target.”

The other odds were:

The web page with the actual bet offer appeared to be offline at the time of writing. According to a copy in Google's cache, it contained the conditions "Must be reported in the Guardian newspaper. Must happen in 2010".

In this issue

19 July 2010 (all comments)

Vandalism

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Am I the only one concerned that people betting over which article will be vandalized next will lead to people secretly vandalizing articles in order to win bets? Dcoetzee 16:49, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

My thoughts exactly. The whole idea of betting on vandalism on Wikipedia will not only lose the betting company money because punters will themselves vandalise pages they have put money on, but it also defeats the idea of the project. Betting companies appear to be gaining similarities with Wikipedia now, as they seem to AGF, which I never thought I'd see. WackyWace ^{you talkin' to me?} 17:24, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

On a different topic, I am disheartened by the amount of people, including the South African government employee, who take everything Wikipedia says as true without cross-checking with other sources. I see it all the time, even to the point of people citing Wikipedia as a source in academic reports. You do not assume any published source is giving you completely true information under any circumstances, especially a source that is fluid such as Wikipedia, and the employee responsible should be reprimanded or sacked for such poor editorial practices. If the employee had taken five seconds to do a Google search for "Joseph Sepp Bellend Blatter", he would have realized that something was up. Or he could have gone to FIFA's website and done a search there. The same goes with Lindsay Lohan's death report. How hard is it to take two seconds to do a search before realizing the rumor you're about to publish is blatantly false? Has society really become lazy to the point where speed is more important than truth, and where instant gratification is better than quality? Xenon54 (talk) 17:33, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Lazy journalists, too. I changed the wording in part of a "current event" page three weeks ago, and within a few hours it was on the BBC online news site. But on the betting issue: the betting company never loses money: they do the math and skim off a percentage. It's a proportion of the betters who lose money. And I'd have thought "pending changes" would remove vandalism from such prominent pages. Perhaps the betting list needs to be added to our pending changes list? Tony (talk) 18:39, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

How are these major BLP vandalism edits still occurring? Isn't this what Pending Changes was supposed to stop? Especially on such a highly-visited page. Why not make all BLPs under pending changes? *sigh* 71.164.195.137 (talk) 23:35, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's complicated. --Chris 08:49, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Chris, is there a link to information on why it's "complicated"? Tony (talk) 09:14, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Um, did you see how much discussion, debate, voting, etc went into getting this fairly mild trial configuration of flagged revs running? I would love for wider use of pending changes but flagged revs are a fairly radical change to a wiki and it is very hard to form consensus. Personally I think there should be a better decision making system, because although I'm all in favor of the notion of consensus, it can be hard to measure and can prevent/stall even very simple changes from happening (e.g. the enabling of rollback, man that was a massive uproar for what in the scale of things was a very small change). Other areas where consensus can suck is where people are misinformed/uneducated about the actual facts (e.g. Adminbots - for a long time people were strongly opposed to them because 'zomg the wiki will blow up/skynet' and they were forced to run in secret, we now have ~11 approved admin bots and the wiki is still here) --Chris 13:36, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

And lets not forget that this whole issue probably was the result of a July 2009 case of vandalism. Kinda predates the time that Pending Changes was even a working model in the software extension. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:05, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The Bellend edit is going to be in the "LOL" file for a while now. How pleasently ironic. ResMar 13:42, 23 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Lazy journalism indeed. 'Bellend' is a British slang term for the glans, not the entire penis. You can never trust a journalist to get the facts right.... 86.147.163.123 (talk) 14:11, 25 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]