"How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit", _The Atlantic_
Gwern Branwen <gwern0 <at> gmail.com>
2012-05-16 15:49:59 GMT
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/how-the-professor-who-fooled-wikipedia-got-caught-by-reddit/257134/
Print: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2012/05/how-the-professor-who-fooled-wikipedia-got-caught-by-reddit/257134/
> A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers tantalizing clues that a long-dead relative may actually
have been a serial killer, stalking the streets of New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century.
A beer enthusiast is presented by his neighbor with the original recipe for Brown's Ale, salvaged decades
before from the wreckage of the old brewery--the very building where the Star-Spangled Banner was sewn in
1813. A student buys a sandwich called the Last American Pirate and unearths the long-forgotten tale of
Edward Owens, who terrorized the Chesapeake Bay in the 1870s.
>
> These stories have two things in common. They are all tailor-made for viral success on the internet. And
they are all lies.
>
> Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason University who were enrolled in T.
Mills Kelly's course, Lying About the Past. Their escapades not only went unpunished, they were actually
encouraged by their professor. Four years ago, students created a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits
of Edward Owens, successfully fooling Wikipedia's community of editors. This year, though, one group of
students made the mistake of launching their hoax on Reddit. What they learned in the process provides a
valuable lesson for anyone who turns to the Internet for information.
>
> The first time Kelly taught the course, in 2008, his students confected the life of Edward Owens, mixing
together actual lives and events with brazen fabrications. They created YouTube videos, interviewed
experts, scanned and transcribed primary documents, and built a Wikipedia page to honor Owens' memory.
The romantic tale of a pirate plying his trade in the Chesapeake struck a chord, and quickly landed on USA
Today's pop culture blog. When Kelly announced the hoax at the end of the semester, some were amused,
applauding his pedagogical innovations. Many others were livid.
>
> Critics decried the creation of a fake Wikipedia page as digital vandalism. "Things like that really,
really, really annoy me," fumed founder Jimmy Wales, comparing it to dumping trash in the streets to test
the willingness of a community to keep it clean. But the indignation may, in part, have been compounded by
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