User talk:Newyorkbrad/Archive/2022/Aug

Noted without (too much) comment
Wikipedia's Credibility Is Toast, a Wikipediocracy article about a longstanding hoax article. It started as "just a joke" on Wikipedia, but spread across the rest of the Internet in the near-decade it survived.

On a site of this size, some things are going to slip through, and I've defended our processes before, including in the Washington Post here. But ... this isn't good. I hope to write a wikiblog post about quality control in the upcoming days. Newyorkbrad (talk) 18:46, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I think this sort of dovetails with the current AfD discussions RfC being spun up, and wider institutional questions of if WP:NODEADLINE is really acceptable these days given how a) most bad articles stay that way, and b) those articles are at the very least much more easy targets for uncorrected vandalism, hoaxes, and plain erroneous information even if produced in good faith. As mentioned, the hoax article wasn't terribly convincing, but the power of circular sourcing managed to give it a veneer of truth. It's going to be much harder to identify hoaxes if they're not similarly pre-internet topics. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs  talk 14:33, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
 * It's not encouraging when you consider that it has taken us ten years to remove the status of seven Featured articles (two still at FAR) written by known hoaxster and sockmaster User:ColonelHenry, who was community banned in 2014. I was not at FAC when these articles were promoted, unaware of the issue, and they only came to FAR attention through the efforts of . Worse, that the FA status is removed does not mean the text-to-integrity issues are cleaned up. recommended long ago reverting the articles to their version before ColonelHenry edited, but that never happened in any of the articles, and misguided editors even attempted to improve the articles rather than blow them up and start over. The discussion at Featured article review/Duino Elegies/archive1 (of how original research or copyvio moved from Wikipedia to scholarly sources) is illuminating. It seems that AGF gets in the way when we are dealing with intentionally disruptive editors; it is possible that hoaxes are included still in all seven articles.  David's mention of "most bad articles stay that way ... and ... plain erroneous information even if produced in good faith" is most discouraging when trying to keep up with medical content, where content has real consequences. I continue to believe we need a BLP-style ability to remove any unsourced or poorly sourced content from medical content. We no longer have enough active and knowledgeable editors to ignore the problems I have long raised in medical content, where the work to maintain minimal accuracy is demoralizing. Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  15:11, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Aug 24: WikiWednesday Salon NYC (+Sep annual meeting)
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--Wikimedia New York City Team via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:44, 23 August 2022 (UTC)