Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-19/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)

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)

• 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)
  • 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)

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)

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

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

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)

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)

• 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)
  • 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)