How many of these Wikipedia users do you think are lying?

What is the prize?

No prize. It's crowdsourcing. You get the satisfaction of knowing you made the world better by helping to out fake college professors on Wikipedia.

Disappointment, disillusionment, and chagrin.

I think I will take the Mystery box... Oooh, a full Professorship in Applied Linguistics from somewhere east of the Danube!

User:Professor Dr. may be my favorite. His user page says:


Only 40 edits to Wikipedia over the course of over 3.5 years, with the only multiple-edit pages being:

International University in Geneva (19)
List of universities in Switzerland (7)
Education in Switzerland (2)

I wonder what Wikipedia has to say about that International University in Geneva that Professor Dr. thinks is so important:



The president of IUG is Mr. Eric Willumsen, who is likely no relation to Wikipedia editor, User:Ewillumsen.

If somebody finds a website more entertaining than Wikipedia, please let me know!

Many of the entries seem boring and tweedy enough to be academics...

This guy is probably not lying:

User:Clive Renquist I am a Professor of THE INTERNET at the prestigious University of Hackham West. Therefore, I know more than you so don't dare to revert my ...

We all know how prestigious that particular field of study is

Please seek immediate medical assistance if you experience an erection lasting more than four hours.

I'm not sure; is Barack Obama on that list?

random sample 1: verified professor

User:Krssrao

"I am a Professor of Biotechnology in Acharya Nagarjuna University in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India."

=

Prof.K.R.S.Sambasiva Rao
Director, ISEBN-2009
Centre for Biotechnology
Acharya Nagarjuna University
Nagarjunanagar – 522 510
Guntur, A.P., India
krssrao@yahoo.com

http://isebnhome.blogspot.com/

and, of course, he hasn't edited for over 2 years.

He must be very wise.

Well of course he's lying [1][2]. The question is whether he expects a certain fraction of readers to take it seriously.

BBL.

A few of my previous professors have used Wikipedia, but many hide their identity. The one received his doctorate from east of the Danube (as alluded to above) but is highly respected in both German and English criticism. Well, his wife (also a professor and a professor of linguistics) happens to be the one who edits his Wiki page but makes does so with little info put forth so I guess no one would figure it out. Or maybe she just doesn't care. The best part - she wrote his first wife completely out of existence.


As for the negative, I know three professors that came to Wikipedia to fix claims on their BLPs and were chased out. The list is at the bottom of my user page if anyone was curious.

Really? Must have already been "wished into the cornfield".

From his page:

---
Hello Wikiaspies, I am Clive Renquist. I am a Professor of THE INTERNET at the prestigious University of Hackham West. Therefore, I know more than you so don't dare to revert my edits or I shall crush you like Stalin.

Yo mama so dumb she think Pere Ube be a solo artist
---

See? I know a quality contributor when I see one.

Look like Clive's most recent mainspace edit is him trying to smear Australian talk show host Andrew Bolt by falsely adding him to the "Australian Neo-Nazis" category.

There are hundreds of thousands of tenured professors in the world and only a few thousand active Wikipedian editors from any background. That you would even have one of your professors who was a significant editor of Wikipedia would be a bit of a long shot. That you claim "a few" do so doesn't have the ring of truth. That of these "many" (number seems to be growing) hide their identity? I think you are making things up and you don't understand what a rare and pathetic endeavor editing Wikipedia really is.

Well, if you knew my identity (just ask Somey if you don't have my email address), then you can find what department I am in. Then you can find out what professors in said department have a wiki page and are east of the Danube. There are only three, and only two are married. Then you can look at the history of the page and see who edits it the most including uploading personal pictures of said person.

I've never said they were -regular- or -significant- editors. They primarily edit their own biographies or related matters. Did you even bother to read what I wrote?

Hell, as for the last part of my statement above: Moulton and I both know Rosalind Picard, who is a professor at MIT. She tried to edit her bio but because it was of a widely seen topic (i.e. it got wrapped up with the ID Cabal war), she was removed quickly.

Who takes the time and trouble to dissect amusing anecdotes?

I've worked with four or five people who 'edited' Wikipedia in an effort to correct distortions or outright errors in their BLPs.

Most were not that worked up about it. Ever been interviewed by a newspaper? There's always something wrong in the published result.

My bullshit detector seems to be wired directly into my mouth. This has never brought popularity. The idea that all of academia is intensely concerned with Wikipedia and that someday they will find Ottava's sad little poem article and restore him to his proper place among the luminaries is much too rich a target in any case.

Roz was never a registered editor. She edited WP a few times from an IP at the Media Lab, then abandoned the effort as a hopeless waste of her time. I had no idea she had even seen her BLP (let alone edited it) until she told me where to look.

Later on, there were others at the Media Lab who made edits from that same MIT Media Lab subnet (18.85.xxx.yyy), but I never learned who they were.

Incidentally, I see where the Discovery Institute no longer falsely claims that the 102 academics who signed an untitled 2-sentence statement back in 2001 were signatories to "A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism." The DI site now just lists a very small number of academics as willing signatories to a similarly worded statement headlined with that curious (and misleading) title.

I'm sure if Dr Picard did register she would have been banned and smeared even harder. At least the IP that was attacked could be dismissed in whatever way without really going after her.

By the way, Moulton, you are a respected researcher who works at MIT based labs. That is rather prominent, and I've always respected you for it even though many (on Wiki and here) tend to not give a damn. There are quite a few people involved in academia and even use the WR boards.

I didn't learn about Carl Hewitt until some time after my horrific encounter with IDCab. Hewitt (whom I have never met and don't claim to know) had a devil of a time on WP, mainly as a result of trying to correct errors in articles on subjects he knew something about (including his own work and his own BLP).

Much later there was a similar fiasco with a Canadian physicist whom I did not know, but whose older brother was familiar to me from the UseNet days, before the advent of the Web.

And then, of course, there were the cases of Larry Sanger and Sam Vaknin, both of whom were insiders back in the early days of WP.

All in all, WP is no place for a respectable academic to be hanging out.

often grossly wrong, which is why people with that experience can be shocked to find that wikipedia is even as half as accurate as it is. and when its not, its what they expected anyway.

The one academic I knew who got his pants in a twist over his article was steamed that he was given credit for a friend's research. An IP editor excised the offending bit about a week later, apparently by coincidence, since it went on to make a few dozen gnomish edits both before and after.

I think this is a joke. Hackham West, South Australia is a lower socio-economic area in Adelaide, where presumably few people either attend university or are employed, hence "study" of the internet being high on the lust of pastimes.

Very likely. I certainly can't figure it out at all.


You're in the USA, right? So if you have any professors east of the Danube, how do you hear them when they lecture? Do they shout very loudly?

I proposed, to much derision at RfAr, that anyone claiming expertise in a field should be treated as if COI. Because charges of being COI were so often used to attack and harass editors, this was seen to be some kind of attempt to pin a badge of shame on experts. But, in fact, being COI should be the opposite: editors who are truly COI will almost always be more expert on the topic than others.

But COI editors should behave according to COI guidelines, which means to avoid revert warring on articles where they are COI, and to avoid making edits on article that they should know would be controversial. They should, however, be *protected* on Talk pages, relatively, and especially if the expertise can be verified (but even if not, as long as they remain civil and reasonably cogent.) Experts will often write long posts on a Talk page, and that should never be sanctioned. (In fact, it often is, and the expert may be blocked as "tendentious," writing "tomes.")

Since the job of an encyclopedia is to educate and inform, an expert should be encouraged to educate and inform the rest of the Wikipedia readership, and, in particular, neutral editors. There are experts on Wikipedia who have managed to find support from certain administrators, who write articles which are unintelligible to ordinary readers, and when someone from the field arrives who then tries to make the article intelligible, they are accused of writing nonsense, of being tendentious, and insulted, and I've seen the "owner" of the articles succeed in getting the new expert sanctioned.

They should both back off, and that's what administrators should be encouraging. Let experts advise, not control. It's an old and very basic principle, often misunderstood on Wikipedia by both experts and others. Experts did not control the Brittanica, the editors did (and, ultimately, the publisher). Advised by experts.

My proposal to treat experts as COI was to protect them, not sanction them!

What I found with Cold fusion was that the more expert I became, the more under attack I was; my habit and understanding of wikitheory, then, led me to increase discussion to establish background, as well as covering specific edits. And this, then, led to sanctions for being "tendentious," though I was being very careful to seek consensus on actual article edits. And it was working. But the resulting long Talk posts were then "evidence" against me. The editors sitting on the article didn't want to actually read about the subject, neither in the original sources, nor on Talk. They simply rejected and reverted anything they didn't like, and since there were a few of them who had accreted themselves there, it was very difficult to bring the article up-to-date, and it was mostly focused on reaction to cold fusion in 1989-1990 and repetition of that in various media sources since then, whereas the scientific literature had gone in an entirely different direction.

"Hackam" was almost certainly intended as a pun on "Hack 'em," the editor was claiming practical experience with hacking. And he might indeed be right, i.e,. be an expert. Is there some hacker organization or group with the name "West" in it?

So this must be "how to make Wikipedia even worse" month. Disrespect for experts is one of pillars of what makes WP suck. You are not an expert in cold fusion. You are at most a hobbyist with some unconventional views.

Better. Sarcasm. Seems to be a vandalism-only account, in any case, every edit I looked at qualified as such. I was temped to !vote in Enric Naval's MfD over this, filed yesterday, but then realized what a colossal waste of time it was. One of two of the pages he nominated might reasonably be kept. But so what? So some editor comes back and finds his user page, mostly a joke, is deleted. On the scale of Wikipedia offenses, this is about a 1 or 2 on a scale of 10.

What I was suggesting was, in fact, exactly appropriate respect for experts, but that anyone claiming to be an expert should not be shoving their views down the throats of everyone else. Don't confuse that with my personal situation, which was exactly as I described it: The more expert I became, the more difficult my position became.

But I'm clearly COI. My views are not unconventional, they are mainstream within the research community that knows the peer-reviewed literature. That was part of my point.

I'm COI because I have a business in the field. Made my first sale a couple of days ago. Some LR-115 radiation detector material, sold through http://lomaxdesign.com/coldfusion.

There is no sharp dividing line between "hobbyist" and "expert," hobbyists are typically far more expert than the general public, in their field of interest, and may even sometimes be more expert than "professors." Depends.

A professor, though, is generally employed in the field and may thus have a specific conflict of interest when it comes to controversy within the field. And there are other conflicts that arise out of misunderstandings as to how Wikipedia functions (or does not function).

"I know this field better than you" should never be a proper article edit summary, even when it is abundantly true. On a Talk page, though, it would be unreasonable to expect those who have paid their dues to learn a field, either deeply (through long education and years of experience), or relatively (as a "hobbyist" or "amateur") to not mention what is obvious to them, that the editor reverting them is a total boob. But when they say that, they should be warned about incivility and support should be provided to resolve disputes. A real expert (amateur or professional), if constitutionally capable of dealing with "boobs" -- some aren't, such as Jed Rothwell in the field of cold fusion -- will be able to bring along neutral editors because of being able to provide sources, or at least to explain the position.

The biggest problems occur where there are matters of common knowledge within a field that aren't covered in reliable source, but may be clear, for example, from email list traffic where experts discuss the field. I've seen this with voting systems articles, as an example. As an encyclopedia depending on other sources, this is a problem, and the solution, in my view, is to allow such material only within negotiated consensus, if at all, but also to avoid phrasing an article to create a misleading impression, which will be recognized only by experts, perhaps, since what is in reliable sources can be misread by non-experts.

And more importantly, how many of them play cricket?


I see. I suppose it never occurred to me that Australia must have ghettoes too. Thanks for clearing that up.

It doesn't exactly look like a slum area to me. In fact, there are many neighborhoods in Dunedin, Florida that look about the same.

Academics show up on Wikipedia all the time. I know, and could name off the top of my head, a dozen or so whom I know personally. They tend not to stick around very long, though, which is the problem. And as Ottava points out, many of them do have an interest in their own BLPs. The same seems to go for people notable for whatever reason.

You're still not doing the math. It is hard for people outside of Wikipedia to understand what a rare event hitting the edit button for most people in any field. This is because so few of them are doing so much of it. Of course the vast majority of professors do not have BLPs at all.

Look at it this way. A large university has literally thousands of faculty members. In the general survey, 34% of respondents had edited Wikipedia at least once. Now, until the final report comes out, it's rather unclear how exactly the sampling was done, but even if their sampling overestimates editors vs. readers by a factor of 10, that leaves 3.4% of people who have read Wikipedia having edited it once or more. That means at a large university, something like a hundred faculty members have edited Wikipedia at least once.

You're confusing the fact that very few people edit Wikipedia actively with the fact that an enormous number have hit the edit button once or twice. They're not the kind of people who have userboxes or userpages or get involved to a great extent, but a large number of academics, including a number I know personally, have edited Wikipedia at least once or twice.

In the BLP subject survey we did a while back in the days of On Wikipedia, we contacted 15 subjects (yes, yes very small sample size but it was a blog not a peer-reviewed journal), 8 were aware of their BLPs. 2 of those mentioned editing Wikipedia; one of them their bio, the other one other articles. That's 25% (which falls roughly in line with 34% in the general survey).

On pushing the [back of the] envelope:

"They say 60% of all the world's statistics are made up right there on the spot..."

If a BA level student always has a different professor for each class (and even always has a professor which is highly unlikely) they would have 30 to 40 professors. In graduate school they would have many less instructors but lets double that to 80. Of course this example goes out its way to bend over backwards to reach the 80 professor number in any event. It could easily with repeat selection of professors and non-professor instructors be as low as 20. "Thousands" is a ridiculous and meaningless number in this context.

It is not remotely possible that anything like 34% of the population has edited Wikipedia. I won't even dignify that with further response. It is more like 1% maybe 2% and this counts many more kids who wade in once or twice to talk about the sexual orientation of their shop teacher then it does professors. It also includes curious people including some professors who make one time breeching experiment edits to see if they "really can" make edits. These people should not be counted at all because they are not going to have discussion with anyone about such a casual exposure. So lets stick with 1%. If a group 80 professors each have a 1% chance of having edited Wikipedia even if they all had occasion to discuss it (which of course they would not) you'd be lucky to have one editor in the group.

In my small sample of experiences, it's a form of selection bias... I'm sitting in the pub off-campus, and a TA walks in with his wireless-enabled notebook and plops it in front of Professor er, 'Wampus' shall we say, who is simply trying to enjoy his Guinness. "Hey, Dr. Wamp! Look at this bullshit about you on Wikipedia!" Ol' Wamp never even looked at Wikipedia before, but he has an interest in it now.

I think that you and I are also talking at cross purposes GlassBeadGame, and Zoloft gets to the point. My point is that it's not at all improbable/impossible for a given individual with an interest in Wikipedia to know a number of academics with a similar interest. In part this is because those with interests in Wikipedia will end up "finding" each other. I, for one, have met a number of professors because they sought me out to ask for help with Wikipedia (and I am not even a university student). My interest in Wikipedia has also rubbed off on a number of people I know, several of whom are university professors. Thus, I personally know a number of professors who edit/have edited Wikipedia, and I think it's quite reasonable that Ottava does too. This is where the hundred professors figure I cite is relevant. If there is someone on a campus widely known to be involved in Wikipedia, there is a large enough community of people who have edited at least a little such that it would not be overly difficult for someone to assemble a group of twenty or a dozen.

Your point seems to that the average student would not, through what we might call random interactions, encounter more than one or two professors who edit/have edited Wikipedia, and that those would tend to have been the most casual editors. I think you're absolutely right about this, but I think the 1-2% figure is a bit low for the population of university professors. I don't think it's in the range of 34% (and others have pointed out that the ridiculousness of that figures throws doubt on the rest of the "General Survey" the results of which are long overdue). There's not really any data available on the matter, so we're left grappling with intuitions and guesses, but I'd place the figure at about 4-5%. That is, of course, nothing more than my guess, just as 1-2% is nothing more than your guess.

I agree that there are clumps within populations. The faculty at the Berkman Center at Harvard probably "clump" and edit Wikipedia at a rate many times more likely than the overall population of professors. The same is true of Moulton and his friends at MIT Media Lab (even I know two others there who edit there which I just thought of...that's amazing.) Generally techie professors might edit at a higher rate than liberal arts professors. But there are clear reason for these clumps. Why a liberal arts/literature student should have a "clump" of professors is not just unclear but counter-intuitive. It also is unlikely that anyone ever became more likely to edit Wikipedia merely because they came into contact with Ottava. Again counter-intuitive.

I have emailed Somey with the personal information and user account name. I asked that he withhold the information but verify that what I said is true.

Furthermore, I never said that they became more likely to edit Wikipedia because of me, nor that they edit anything related to me or the rest. To the contrary, their account was created more than a year before I began editing.

For "a few" or "many" professors? Clearly you were not talking about one. My issue is with the assertion of having multiple professors who edit Wikipedia. You can't weasel out with documentation of one.

An academic I just read about is fulmanating that "Books, LLC" is publishing two dozen biographies of scientists in his field. And he has a bio in there! And they never contacted him for permission.

Wait till he finds out that the "bio" in this book is his WP BLP. The one he fought to keep on WP, being a bit of a self-promotor.

I hope the version they used doesn't say that Professor L. Jackson Knoles is a big poopy head. At least I think I hope that. Maybe I don't.

As opposed to a self-prosensor?

Jon

You are an idiot and a troll.

Reread what I said - "many" applies to people in general. The "few" are those I -know- who are professors and have edited. The "many" applies to the possibility of people who edit and no one would really know who they are, including professors and the rest.

I then provided a specific account, one I verified. You, left without any real ground, started mouthing off again. My information has been proven. You have nothing. Therefore, you resort to more of your nonsense.

By the way, you fucked up and admitted to having a regular editing account last week. I'm wondering just which scum editor you are. Chances are, you are an Arbitrator seeing as how you are someone who just makes up crap, constantly hates on people actually trying to fix the place, etc.

Somey, have you guys figured out how to allow people to ignore GBG yet? His nonsense is far too pathetic to have to look at.

So what you're saying is that you got just the one, right?

I think if Ottava mentioned being banned from WP, they would become at least somewhat more likely. I would.

As I stated, there were two that I was willing to talk about in detail besides the three that I publicly listed on my user page. Somey can verify the details about them.

It would only take -one- to prove you wrong. You were the one mouthing off with outrageous absolutes and unwilling to think that anyone would bother to edit. You are just a hateful little troll and it doesn't matter how often people point that out, that you are being an idiot, etc, you just keep it up.

You must be an Arbitrator, because only they have enough anger and no job to be able to keep it up for as often as you do.