Stephen Colbert Causes Chaos on Wikipedia, Gets Blocked from Site

Umm...no. His point isn't that truth is relative. Clearly, we can verify elephant population numbers. It's that people are too lazy to take the time to verify things, so go with the first search engine hit that pops up. The point is that uncritical minds believe everything they read.

On the contrary, it would be hilarious! Colbert's made a fantastic point: Wikipedia can't be trusted as a reliable source of information.

Thought I would reply to Rutty-- my niece and her husband, as well as my nephew, live in London. They are able to watch Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" over there (Stephen Colbert's show came from a spin-off of that one; he used to star on that show before he got his own program). I think you'd like "The Daily Show"-- nothing is sacred and the parodies are hilarious. Jon Stewart does a particularly hilarious imitation of George W.

I don't know whether my rel's have satellite or cable or just watch Sky or Beeb. Maybe you can ask around or do some research and find what channel it's on. Have fun!

Wikipedia is a better source than 90% of the sources out there... And the more people are interested in the information, especially in a disputed area, the more accurate it is going to be. Say what you like about a classic encyclopedia, there's still only a small group of people who have go / no go authority over each individual article. Can you imagine, for example, the difference between an article on Ronald Regan if the people with final say were all Republican or all Democrat? If they were all hardcore Libertarian or socio-capitalistic?

My favorite Stephen Colbert quote:

The truth has a well known liberal bias.

I think he stated that "Facts have a well known liberal bias" which is why he prefers the truth, or truthiness, to facts.

I believe it was "Reality has a well known liberal bias".

If you don't believe me, look it up on wikipedia :)

Fortunately, the UK doesn't have the 3 ring circus that's presently ruining the US. The Colbert report is totally a product of our horrendous political situation. When you guys get a Colbert report, you're in trouble. In the meantime feel free to mock us, and by the way, any chance of reunion with the mother country? Bush is an idiot. God Save the Queen.

Cobert replaces humor with ample amount of asshattery as it's the only form he knows. Wikipedia is as accurate, if not more, than Britannica* thanks to the VOLUNTEERS that run it. The fact that that kid who carved swear words into his desk in middle school 'grew up' and decided to deface other things isn't terribly surprising, if a bit saddening.

(*wikipedia/brittanica article at news(dot)com(dot)com/Study+Wikipedia+as+accurate+as+Britannica/21w-M1038_3-5997332.html)

Rutty,

The Colbert Report is a spin off of the John Stewart show. I believe you get John Stewart in the UK. You will probably get The Colbert Report as well in the future. Colbert is basically making fun of Right wing political shows like the O'Reily factor on Fox news. The Colbert Report may have a lot of material that would be lost in translation to the U.K. Kind of like Trigger Happy TV. It was brilliant if you ever lived in England. However, the average American wouldn't get the material unless they were from a big city like New York.

rutty, I think you may be missing the point of colbert's exercise. wikipedia is an overhyped Internet scam. if anyone can says anything and have it become "a fact", what is the value of the whole system. we have enough of that already in the US. It's called politics.

Jon Stewart? I thought Craig Kilborn was the host of the Daily Show!

/gotta love those five questions

lostguy wrote: "wikipedia is an overhyped Internet scam"

A few definitions...

• overhype - tr.v: To promote or publicize to excess
• scam - n.: A fraudulent business scheme; a swindle.

Who is promoting or publicizing Wikipedia? Do you see Wikipedia advertisements anywhere? All I see is people referencing it... because, well, it's useful.

How is Wikipedia a fraudulent business scheme? Is their goal to make money? Do they charge for the service they provide? Do they even advertise on the site?

For more information on scams, see Wikipedia's lengthy article on the subject. ;)

You guys had Orwell.

Well, muddmonkey, that may be so, but I know of no college professor who allows wikipedia as a source.

I know plenty of med school professors who do.

wikipedia is great as long as it has references to legit articles or sources. it's a good way to look something up, however it isn't always accurate. it doesn't claim to be though...

You can watch both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report in the UK. More4 shows the Daily Show, I can't remember which channel shows the Colbert Report, but you can watch bith shows on line as well on the Comedy Central website.

Doc CeCe

"I know plenty of med school professors who do. "

At LAST, someone has explained  the major malfunction of so many of our physicians in this country today!!!!!  If one does not participate in their own medical care, a local physician and/or his staff, will kill you for sure!!!  :)

The reason we techs are better than everybody else is we actually get the joke. By the way, 'the joke' is about you.

Brooks, I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say.

The main point in my geeky eyes of Colbert's call for wikipedia vandalism is that nobody should rely on just one source for information. This has been a repeated moral of the wikipedia-vs.-britannica-and-others story. No self-respecting researcher would rely only on britannica in his/her papers, nor wikipedia, nor any other source.

When you think about it, wikipedia is really a condensed version of the web in general -- tons of content, with a several bad apples mixed in with the good.

No wonder I love that show....I didn't know that! That's awesome. Colbert was a genius on the daily show, and that genius shines even brighter now as the complete counter to the "liberal" daily show with great satire and over the top way of showing "truthiness" (to use another of the words he's coined). Watching both the shows back to back every day is the best way I can think of to get some laughs, get some interesting conversation topics...and occasionally even a bit of news :)

First of all I want to say that Colbert was never a two-bit background guy on the Daily Show. Colbert was one of the original correspondents and was an active writer throughout the series. I would say he was a large part of the success of the show and was one of the most popular of the correspondents along with Steve Carrel. He did however not create Harvey Birdman which was created by Michael Ouweleen and Erik Richter who write the show. He was actually more of a two-bit background guy on HBM than on TDS. He is freaking hilarious on it though.

I think his success is fully deserved and a long time coming. Definitely one of the comedy greats of our time.

Ha, I will consider myself set straight. Serves me right for, uh, learning everything about Colbert from wikipedia...

;)

Steven Colbert did NOT create Harvey Birdman, it was created by Michael Ouweleen and Erik Richter. Colbert just did the voices of Reducto and Phil as well as a random line here and there (such as one of the fellow inmates in the Scooby-Do episode).

Nice example of Truthiness though.

A recent study by Nature found that for scientific articles, Wikipedia's accuracy (in terms of errors per article) is remarkably close to Encyclopedia Britannica.

Is Wikipedia the be-all and end-all authoritative source? Hell no, but it makes a great starting point... providing things to check up on, other sources to read, and if you find that Wikipedia has poor information about something, you can improve it yourself!

What exactly is Colbert "right" about here? It was a funny bit, but as far as I can tell, all he really demonstrated is that Wikipedia is self-correcting.

I saw that study too, Morwynd, and often went to Wikipedia when I was in uni biology as a jumping off point for concepts I wasn't clear on. I think, aside from Colbert's stunt (which I think is funny), it's the more controversial articles (on politics, etc.) that are prone to problems rather than scientific articles.

Exactly... controversial/recent events stuff often has different groups disagreeing over it. But academic stuff not in dispute, is usually pretty bang on.

I thought it was widely known that the Nature article was >Fabricated.

I guess not...

I thought it was widely known that the Nature article was Fabricated.

Can you elaborate on that? Because the only thing I can find is that there is some disagreement about the nature article... mainly between Wiki and Britannica supporters.

"I thought it was widely known that the Nature article was Fabricated."

Fabricated? That is a rather serious accusation to level against a respected science and medical journal, do you have a source for that claim?

Now, naturally Britannica was mad as hell about the Nature study and disputed the results and their methodology, but they have an obvious bias and financial self-interest involved here. (That doesn't prove their claims are wrong, but it certainly gives them a motive to attack the Nature article)

Nature discusses the dispute, and provides a formal response and point-by-point rebuttal of Britannica's claims here: http://www.nature.com/nature/britannica/index.html

Here's how they conducted the study:

it consisted of asking independent scholars to review 50 pairs of articles from the Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica websites. The reviewers were not informed which of their pair of articles came from which source

Independent scholars, blind to which source they were reviewing. That sounds pretty fair to me.

If anyone has seen any criticism of the Nature study that is NOT based on complaints from Britannica, I would be very interested in reading it.

Independent scholars, blind to which source they were reviewing. That sounds pretty fair to me.

From my understanding of Britannica's side of the story, the problems with the methodology was that those 50 articles were not chosen randomly, and were handpicked to include more errors than usual. Take that as what you will though.

| Wikipedia is a collection of stories that are not necessarily proven to be true.

So is everything that's related in our history books: nothing but an interpretation of past events that some group of people has agreed on.

On many things, Wikipedia might be just as good as any other indirect source. By being accessible to all, it also receives better scrutiny.

From my understanding of Britannica's side of the story, the problems with the methodology was that those 50 articles were not chosen randomly, and were handpicked to include more errors than usual."

Do you have a source for that?

Unfortunately, I am unable to read the full text of Britannica's complaints, their PDF gives me an error.

However, here are Britannica's complaints as listed in Nature's point-by-point rebuttal (all of which Nature disputes, read the rebuttal for details):

• You reviewed text that was not even from the Encyclopaedia Britannica
• You accused Britannica of "omissions" on the basis of reviews of arbitrarily chosen excerpts of Britannica articles, not the articles themselves
• You rearranged and re-edited Britannica articles
• You failed to distinguish minor inaccuracies from major errors
• Your headline contradicted the body of your article

Nothing in there about the article selection process. Here's what Nature says about it in their Supplemental Information document:

Q: How were the articles selected? A: Each of the reporters that worked on the survey chose 10 to 15 scientific terms that were roughly in their scientific beat – the sorts of things we ourselves would check in an encyclopaedia. We had not looked at any of these entries in either encyclopaedia when we selected them. Then we weeded out the terms that did not have any entry in Britannica (they all appeared in Wikipedia), and any for which the entries were vastly different in length. Sometimes the lengths were balanced by amalgamating two or three Britannica entries into one coherent piece – for example, 'ethanol' was done this way. We felt this represented 'everything Britannica had to say on the subject' – at least, everything we could find by a quick search of Britannica online, exactly the way a user would approach it.

Q: Were the various titles also seen to represent a cross section of science? A: Yes, deliberately so. We tried to have a reasonable spread of Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Environment and Others. We also tried to have a good mix of People, Things, Events, Ideas / Processes and Places.

>I think Colbert is right. Wikipedia is a collection of stories that are not necessarily proven to be true.

Yes, much like the New York Times.

>I think Colbert is right. Wikipedia is a collection of stories that are not necessarily proven to be true.

Yes, much like the New York Times.

Which is different than, say, Fox News which tends to be a collection of stories guarenteed to only be slightly true -- not quite as factual as the Enquirer, but a (very) little more than Weekly World News.

the Nature article said that Britannica had almost as many errors as Wikipedia. Wikipedia averaged something like 4-5 errors PER ARTICLE.

It's shocking because Britannica's excellent reputation is a leftover from the old days, when it used to have people like Albert Einstein writing its articles.

I assure you, if I thought for one instant that the issue of Nature magazine I read that in had 4-5 errors per article (or over one hundred errors in that magazine issue alone), I would cancel my subscription.

Although if it were Nature being held up under a microscope, I am sure they would put away their traditional "hard science" contempt for the so-called "soft sciences" & insist on using the more accurate methodologies developed by social scientists (for what is, after all, a social science evaluation). The peer review system is good enough for journal publication, but it's clearly not well suited for comparison-contrast evaluations.

even if my canadian views dont necessarily agree with his american Bushness.

That's what makes Stephen Colbert (the character) even funnier. If you're familiar with Colbert (the person) from his life before the Colbert Report, you'd know that he's pretty much the opposite of the character he portrays. Which is why it was hilarious when he had the guy from the Catholic League on last week. That guy had no clue that Colbert was sitting there mocking him and his beliefs to his face...

To my understanding he is actually a devout catholic.

(Psst... that's satire... If he's ever out of character, you can tell where he lands - firmly on the left.)

He's trying to take em down from the inside... : p I know he was raised a Catholic, but I wasn't aware that he's a fully practicing one. Good to know. Apparently there's a lot more depth to Colbert (the man) than I was aware of...

According to his interview on Conan O'Brian he actually teaches Sunday school as well, and he seemed very serious about that and being a Catholic so I would say thats probably accurate.

Quite possibly, but the Catholic League isn't really endorsed by the Catholic Church proper.

However, the League breaks away from the Church on many other issues, such as the Iraq War, capital punishment, evolution and welfare, taking politically conservative positions that are fundamentally at odds with the Vatican, leading many to criticize the League as being pro-Republican and politically biased and not representative of true Catholic positions.

Appropriately enough, taken from Wikipedia.

The problem is likely because Wikipedia has come under so much fire lately, from almost all possible angles. The people who use and edit it herald it as some new kind of media, while everyone else constantly finds ways to debunk it.

I feel kind of naive because I've used it on reports in the past, even cited it, and gotten good marks, and reading that people have failed reports because the information was false kind of scares me. Maybe the people who've claimed that are lying, but somehow I feel it's rather true.

Regardless, the site's creator was right when he said that anyone who cites an encyclopedia deserves what's coming to them.

Well, it's not permanently locked so I don't really see anything that's fixed.

(Hate to ruin the fun :D)

Oh shoot Corey, the masses seem to agree with you ;)

"all of it was locked and reverted thus kind of disproving his point"

The main Elephant article was locked with vandalism (a count of 1.8 million elephants instead of 600,000) intact. Since it was locked, none of the normal users could revert it until an admin came back and fixed it. It looks like it took about 20 minutes for that to happen.

OMG...
So for 20 minutes the population of Elephants DOUBLED !!!
This Colbert guy obviously has Super-Powers!

Wow!

So for 20 whole minutes, your global population of Elephants DOUBLED!
This Colbert guy must have super powers.

It'd be like an essay I wrote where if people wanted something to happen, it did. Within a few creative limitations, of course.

Colbert is a satirist, dude. Moreover, he's a satirist who has built a successful show on the concept that "truth" is something that can and should be fudged to gain an advantage. What better way to demonstrate that than Wikipedia? He didn't just do it to piss off Jimmy Wales. It was a work of satirical art, and a brilliant one at that.

My first impulse was to be annoyed at this, because I really like wikipedia and this sort of sabotage seems to be a real problem. I still don't think he should have encouraged it.

However, as much as it pains me he has actually put his finger on a legitimate concern. I want the project to work, but as long as there are people who value truthiness over truth then any public forum - including wikipedia - is going to be vulnerable. It's a painful lesson but a good one.

You cannot fix the flaws in a system by ignoring their existence and hoping no one notices.

I don't think the wikiality of wikipedia has anything to fear from the truthiness of Colbert.

Moreover, he's a satirist who has built a successful show on the concept that "truth" is something that can and should be fudged to gain an advantage.

ummm...is that a typo? cause otherwise, i think you've missed the point...

My understanding of the edits in wiki lead me to believe that any damage sustained by Colbert and his flock can be undone with ease. Just take those entries back to their pre-Colbert status.

If anything, a few people as a joke will sign up for wikipedia accounts to screw around, see how easy it is and search around. Those folk might find some area that wiki is deficient in, and add to the thing.

Wiki is strong.
A few weeks after the show airing, there isn't likely to be much more defacing of elephant entries (until the episode reruns).

@Bob Stevens: haha. That'd be hilarious!

Its pretty funny what he did. Somehow I always thought he was a democrat who was making fun of republicans or something. Or just anyone he chose... Ah... I don't watch it that much actually.

Though, I always thought it sucked that you could go into Wikipedia and edit stuff even if you weren't schooled in the subject! That's how your never entirely sure if the information you got was correct anyhow! One way to check, if your concerned, is too look up the information on the Wikipedia site in the library and find a book on it. That book(s) will either prove or disprove the information on Wikipedia. Its just a site to start on and then you could go into more depth by researching the topic in book(s) at the Library.

OK, well first Colbert showed Wikipedia to be easily manipulatable. Funny!

Then, wikipedia administrators show themselves to be humorless bastards by overreacting and banning Stephen Colbert. Colbert scores another point!

I don't think they deserve a round of applause at all. All it proves is that at least one out of probably several hundred people watches cable TV ... I can't remember the last time I got a round of applause for that.

Now maybe if they had changed the Stephen Colbert entry to a picture of a giant jock strap and locked that version in for a few years, wikipedia would have won.

mo-99057 sounds like a bot.

maybe what they need is a comedy and spoof section, and then mr colbert can post there.

Well, "wikiality.com" was just registered last night, apparently about 2 minutes after Colbert used the word (11:37pm ET). Maybe you could convince them to make that into a fake encyclopedia, if they're not principally interested in domain squatting.

What about uncyclopedia?

comedy and spoof section

Try going to uncyclopedia.org

Wikipedia is not supposed to be for or against feminism or anything else, it is a repository for data and reference material. If you feel there should be more postings *about* feminism please add them to make the site more complete. That is the purpose of Wikipedia in the first place isn't it?

i have found the site to be very biased itself and not pro feminist. it has very few true feminist writings or postings. so who cares about wikipedia!

Unclear on the concept, are we babe?

It is a great resource, but the fact that someone like Colbert could get away with vandalism, as you say, at all makes it seem like the Library is a good and safe alternative to the resources on the internet. Yes, that should be the focus. There needs to be really good editors on that site who know how to make sure that the site isn't filled with spam and whatnot. I think that the editor(s?) right now, did the right thing by blocking Colbert. However that is funny.

"the fact that someone like Colbert could get away with vandalism"

He didn't get away with it though.. that's the point.

Do you realize how easy it is to fix this stuff? You don't have to re-type stuff that was lost, or delete new stuff or anything... you just click a couple buttons to revert to an older version.

TRUE vandalism of Wikipedia (ie, destroying or permanently altering information) is impossible... you simply submit edits, which can easily be dismissed after the fact.

>TRUE vandalism of Wikipedia (ie, destroying or permanently altering information) is impossible... you simply submit edits, which can easily be dismissed after the fact.

This raises an interesting point. What constitutes permanent altering of information? If you can seed malicious information for a certain time, when the public's eye is focused on that topic, you might succeed in creating a false idea in a sizeable proportion of the public that could persist for years. I would suggest that altered information does not need to be done permanently for it to have a permanent effect.

Able Ape

"If you can seed malicious information for a certain time, when the public's eye is focused on that topic, you might succeed in creating a false idea in a sizeable proportion of the public that could persist for years."

A possibility, to be sure.

However, by the very nature of having "the public's eye is focused on that topic", it is reasonable to expect that those "false ideas" will tend to get corrected.

Or, to borrow a phrase from programming, "Many eyes make shallow bugs".

Which is why any article worth its salt provides multitudes of sources from outside articles.

IOW, your meritocracy is "better" than Wikipedia's.

Thank you for that. Very insightful.

Monday night's episode with Wikipedia, Colbert does raise very valid points

Points being that anyone can vandalize the wiki, so it can't be a trusted source of information. What makes the information in books so special? All information you get should be checked for validity.

and BTW it's meteoric.
--TM

I tried to seed that yesterday but it came up red, so it's somewhere on the vine.

Yea, Myk, I got to it first.

And here I thought Sam Adams was a whisky maker all this time!!! See, ya learn sumthin' new everyday !!! LOL !!!

....Oh - I know! Mr. Adams was really a lil ole whiskey-makin' "tipsy" defensive tackle for the Cincinnati Bengals ??? Wiki needs to add that part too now and I'll cite it in my next thesis paper on th e great US historical figures of all time!!! LOL !!!

lol. :)

Key KDW, who are you talking to in your post when you say "You blame him for malicious intent" ??? I don't see anyone doin' that on this board, do you???

Oh, never mind, I just went back and re-read some serious opinionated stuff like that, ROTFLMAO !!! Hey Wiki-Peeps...can you spell S A T I R E ! ? !

The man has a site. It is for serious articles only. Too many people take these things too serious and take their opinions way to serious. You blame him for taking it too seriously, but I don't see how it did anything other than needless harm and vandalism. He asked his audience to deface an article written by someone who used his free time to write something he thought would be helpful to other people on a site that many people care about and love. Right away too many people are stating that he was just joking around and that it didn't do any harm. Sounds like Wikipedia just got a whole lot more vandalists for no good reason. You should sit back, relax, and respect that it simply isn't funny to ruin something that people dedicate themselves to for the sake of others, just for a cheap laugh. You might feel better about the world.

For seeming so self-righteous in your post, you sure are oblivious to how inept your obvious bias makes you look.

Interestingly enough, "wikiality" produces absolutely zero results on Google right now.

I'm sure it will explode in coming days... seems like Colbert could popularize a string of random characters sometimes. :)

And now... less than 48 hours later, googling Wikiality produces 1,830,000 results.

Go Colbert! ;)