A problem that prevents people from spotting things like this is that there are tons and tons of sites that just have copies of Wikipedia articles or the site just blindly copies things from Wikipedia.
For example... Alicia Keys birthday on Wikipedia is wrong, she was born in 1980, not 1981. If you read the Talk page about this there are several times where discussion of this takes place. But due to a Wiki Admin sitting on the page, he/she refuses to acknowledge this change and the articles he cites that she was born in 1981 most likely were using the Wikipedia article as reference. So how do you argue your position when the admin says, "Hey my source is Magazine X, it is reputable so therefore you are wrong"
Wikipedia is not about truth, it is about verifiability. That's fine, everyone[1] knows this. Anything that appears in WP should be traceable to multiple reliable printed sources.
For the article you mention there should be some way of getting multiple reliable sources of a birthdate.
When one person sits on a page there's verious conflict resolution measure to jump through that might help. I hate WP so I'm not going to get involved but I guess there are some admins here who might want to help you.
What's troubling about the OP is that this WP article was a good article, and so should have had some kind of thorough vetting. That's disconcerting.
Also, once an article reaches good or great (or whatever) status I'm not sure if there's any way for visitors to get that exact version of the article, rather than just what today's edit it.
"Anything that appears in WP should be traceable to multiple reliable printed sources."
However, even "professional" journalists have become so sloppy these days that it's likely that the printed source used Wikipedia as the basis for its information.
I think it's gotten worse with the coming of the web. When newspapers were printed once a day, they had a few hours to check facts and edit before press time. Now that a newspaper is expected to have a story published on the web minutes after it happens, there's much less time to do this. The newspapers have become much more like TV news.
>What's troubling about the OP is that this WP article was a good article, and so should have had some kind of thorough vetting. That's disconcerting.
It did fail featured article review because it was missing page numbers. I can hope that if the hoaxer had then provided fictitious page numbers, someone would have looked for the sources.
>Also, once an article reaches good or great (or whatever) status I'm not sure if there's any way for visitors to get that exact version of the article, rather than just what today's edit it.
It'll be listed on the talk page, though obviously that doesn't help the average visitor. (Though, the average visitor probably wouldn't notice the good article badge in the first place.)
Perhaps it would be a good idea for disputes to be recorded with the wikipedia article i.e. in your case their would be a dispute registered in the foot notes over the birth date of Alicia Keys(with a link to the alternative put forward). This would allow others to investigate further if need be, adding any new information to the dispute as and when found.
There was recently a similar issue with the article for the singer Paloma Faith. To cut a long story short, Ms Faith claimed to have been born in 1985, and given that she claimed this fairly consistently, it was reported as fact in a range of publications.
Every official record, however, has her date of birth in 1981. On the talk page for the article, people were producing her record on the births index, on company incorporation documents, there was even someone who went to school with Ms Faith confirming she was born in 1981.
In the last couple of weeks the case went to dispute resolution and the issue has finally been resolved (i.e. her date of birth has been changed to 1981), but I was shocked by how pedantic certain users were being, refusing to correct the issue for technical reasons (the official documents are not accessible free-of-charge so could not be used as references, etc.)
The problem is that wikipedia has become too heavily relied on, and there aren't any better alternatives yet. Wikipedia is just an encyclopedia, and in some ways it's not actually a very good one. The standard of "proof" for a wikipedia article is actually not a primary source, it's a secondary source. Wikipedia is setup, in its blood, to avoid having to do original work to verify facts, they want other trusted organizations to do the leg work.
However, increasingly people are using wikipedia as a first and only source of data, and this includes many of those "trusted organizations", which produces a trust loop paradox. And this is because despite all these faults wikipedia still manages to be a solid, accurate source of information most of the time.
We're not going to escape out of this paradox until primary sources become more available on the internet and we start getting articles written which make use of primary sources.
This is a good reminder of the only safe way to use Wikipedia: as a pointer
to references, rather than as an actual source of information. And you must check those references yourself, rather than assuming that they say what the article authors claim they say.
Is there really something like a "save way"? Every expressed knowledge can be wrong in the end. You can increase your level of certainty by checking the origin of the information, reputation of source and author, or by measuring against common sense.
What degree of certainty is needed for - looking up a subject you are generally interested in? A undergrad paper? A local newspaper journalist? A doctoral thesis?
90% of my Wikipedia usage falls in the category of self-education and general interest. Wikipedia is certainly a safe source for that.
And this of course is the tricky bit. There is a parable about a conqueror who captured a city by throwing a handful of diseased grain into the grainary and telling the town this. The town surrendered to his siege rather than anyone eat possibly tainted grain.
Of course the message is that you can sometimes destroy the value of a large asset or strength with a small act. The trick is that if anyone ate the grain it was unlikely they would get sick, but if someone did get the tainted grains they would get very very sick and possibly die. Wikipedia lives and dies by who is willing to use it as a source of information, and once that source it tainted "enough" the bit flips and nobody uses it.
Perhaps we read different blogs :-) I see a lot of hand wringing at the lack to journalistic ethics and poor research which results in either misleading or worst completely inaccurate stories. Those complaints about the NY Times write who made up sympathetic characters for his story? The Wired science writer who repackaged stuff. Poor information integrity in general.
I was using "safe" in a relative sense. I don't disagree with anything you've said. Wikipedia is generally pretty accurate, useful, and safe for casually informing yourself about a non-controversial topic. But it's not "safe" to use in research, for example. There is a joke I heard somewhere: "If you don't believe me, just look it up on Wikipedia! But wait 15 minutes before you do."
I have started a Hacker News Consulting firm, and if you want to interview me about how this is "a thing" for a major news article that gets my name in print, I would be happy to explain that to you.
One of the results of Wikipedia, is that I now take every supposedly reliable article with a grain of salt. Any encyclopedia that doesn't provide detailed references that I can review, I presume to be inaccurate until proven otherwise.
That, I think, is the greatest contribution that Wikipedia has made - it requires people to cite their sources, before they get any credibility; and even then, there is always some doubt.
I hope you apply the same standard to news and magazine articles, and realize the sorry state that journalism is in now. Wikipedia will never e better than the sum of its sources, many of which are awful.
Journalism has never been in a particularly good state, the patina of history notwithstanding. Its never been a medium that has required extensive citation of non-trivial propositions.
Beat me to it! This particular hoax is a masterpiece, complete with maps, portraits, and a lengthy list of references. I can't find a definitive source on how long it sat on Wikipedia before being discovered (the history of the linked page is muddled as it's a copy, and surprisingly this hoax isn't listed on the list of hoaxes --yet), but IIRC it was up at least a couple of months.
To me, the fact that these expertly-created hoaxes on Wikipedia have eventually been discovered is a testament to the strength of the Wikipedia model. It's certain that there are still weaknesses, as have been outlined in other comments on this story, but if we were to be given a crystal ball to verify all of recorded human history, we'd surely find that a staggering amount of it is wholly false winners-write-the-history-books nonsense.
What's more interesting about this article is the staggering, agressive ignorance displayed by the commenters on the India Times website. If you're interested in a dose of outrage to get your blood boiling, give them a read.
The problem is we don't know how many hoaxes are there and have _not_ been discovered. If there are a lot, then the model is failing, if there are only a few, then it is working.
Alas, without that data, we can't make a call on the wikipedia article either way.
It should be relatively easy to create a Wikipedia page about something so obscure that nobody is actively looking for it or an expert in it. Add to it, it is well-written and appears to be well-referenced by made-up books.
The article talks about an admittedly little-known clash between India and Portugal in the 1600's where there was little damage or historical consequence after. It's like an island in the ocean of wikipedia, rather than a new island inserted into a river that people pass by every day.
It'd be much harder to make up something about a little known clash between Germany and Canada during World War 2 because so many experts on WW2 exist.
I don't see why it would have been created for that purpose, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of kudzu sites scraping Wikipedia and cloning its articles as early as 2005:
For example... Alicia Keys birthday on Wikipedia is wrong, she was born in 1980, not 1981. If you read the Talk page about this there are several times where discussion of this takes place. But due to a Wiki Admin sitting on the page, he/she refuses to acknowledge this change and the articles he cites that she was born in 1981 most likely were using the Wikipedia article as reference. So how do you argue your position when the admin says, "Hey my source is Magazine X, it is reputable so therefore you are wrong"