The Land of Ozz

“Any user can change any entry and if enough other users agree with them then it becomes true.”

This is a quote that was pulled from a Comedy Central snippet that appeared in a Fox News story that ran this past Thursday evening. While the quote above did come from a comedy act, it is unfortunately a part of reality on the Internet.

“Anyone can post information as if it were fact…without any editorial review before the information is posted.”

This was a comment offered by a legal expert who was interviewed during the Fox News story. The story talks about how lives and reputations can get ruined by the activities of people who go to Wikipedia with an ax to grind.

I recently found an entry posted to Wikipedia about a very popular book written by a friend of mine. The sales numbers on this one book run in the millions. The book has nearly 1000 customer reviews on Amazon with 50% of the reviews giving the book a 5 out of 5 rating. Yet, there are a select few Internet users vandals (as described in the Fox News story) who have taken it upon themselves to try to sabotage the success of this book and ruin the reputation of the authors. These people have built web sites dedicated to discrediting the authors going as far as to use the author’s name in their site’s domain name. Some bloggers that I have questioned have openly admitted to never having read the book even though they proudly repeat the lies written by these vandals as if it were fact.

So you are wondering what the title of the book is, who are the authors, and who are these Internet vandals? Man I like the term vandal, especially as the term is defined in the Unabridged Dictonary.com entry.

“Vandal - (2) a person who willfully or ignorantly destroys or mars something beautiful or valuable.”

Vandal was the term used in the Fox News story to describe the folks who participate in activities of spreading lies that can damage the lives and reputations of others. As for who I am talking about, well I am not going to give any more details right now. Some of you will be smart enough to figure it out. Some of you reading this may have even participated in creating and editing the Wikipedia entry in question. I have not touched the entry nor have I ever posted a review on Amazon for the book. I felt that my inexperience with Wikipedia in particular was reason enough to leave the editing to the experts for now. As for the Amazon reviews, I have not wanted there to be any potential for anyone to say that the deck is stacked in terms of customer reviews.

Fortunately some seasoned Wikipedia editors have warned these vandals that they must comply with Neutral Point of View (NPOV) rules. The wiki editors have removed much of the opinionated content, but there’s still way too many links to the lies for me to point you to the article. The entry is simply not reliable and contains way more opinion than fact. The current ratio of negative (criticism) links is 3-to-1 over the number of links to official web sites representing the author and the book that the wiki entry was written about. The vandals have not paid very much attention to the wiki editors. The contributions of the vandals have been far from neutral from the start. In fact, according to the editing history, it took nearly five months before a single positive (supporting) link was added to this Wikipedia entry. There were plenty of external links to the critic’s sites, but not a single link to an official web site representing the author or the book.

Why am I being so mysterious? My goal is not to embarrass these vandals like they so enjoy trying to do with my friend. I certainly have the ammunition to embarrass at least one of them if that were my motive. At least one of the (uhm?) anonymous contributors appearing in the edit history of the wiki entry about my friend’s book has made visits to this site and even left comments. On at least one occasion the IP address shown in a comment on one of my blogs matched exactly what appeared in the Wikipedia editing history for this book’s entry on the same night. I do not find this IP address match up to be a coincidence since several of the comments on my blog from this visitor show them coming from the same IP address consistently for over two months. The IP addresses this visitor has been sourcing from for over two years has changed slightly from time to time. This tells me that their ISP is issuing addresses from a DHCP pool the same way many ISPs do business. However, a majority of the edits in the history of the Wikipedia entry I have been referring to came from the same ISP’s address pool that this visitor has been sourcing from for over two years when visiting this blog. This leads me to believe that this visitor of my site has been one of the primary contributors to this one Wikipedia topic. The majority of contributions to this particular Wikipedia entry were made by people who have no interest in publishing facts. Their message is full of slander and lies.  Why am I making a big deal out of this? Because it can happen to anyone. It can happen to you or someone you love.

In closing I want to make it clear that this is not a critique of Wikipedia but a critique of the people who vandalize Wikipedia and the Internet in general. I find Wikipedia to be a great resource on many subjects. Unfortunately there are a few “Internet Vandals” who try to misuse Wikipedia as a place to vent their frustrations over the success of others.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Media, News, Techie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.