The satirical comedy-news show The Colbert Report made prominent mention of Wikipedia and said how easy it was to vandalize the online wiki site. Host Stephen Colbert then called on his loyal viewers to trample on the [[Elephant]] page on Wikipedia to add bogus information, as a gonzo-exercise in truthiness. (Video found via YouTube/OGrady.)
Of course Colbert is all about fun and games, but it inspired a deluge of visitors to Wikipedia and to elephant-related pages.
Fortunately, it also showed how the Wikipedia community is robust and can filter out noise and vandalism quite effectively.
- Immediately after the initial burst of activity, the [[Elephant]] page was put into semi-protection mode, meaning “new” users and anonymous users could not edit.
- The AntiVandalBot, an automated software robot that automatically detects and reverts vandalism based on pattern matching and heuristics, cleaned up lots of obvious vandalism. See an example in the edit history where the bot reverted the spurious addition of “EXPLAIN THAT AL GORE!”
In the end, one prominent Wikipedian, Tawker, who also runs the anti-vandalism robot Tawkerbot4, posted this on his blog:
I blocked Stephen Colbert on Wikipedia
Yes, that’s right. I blocked the defender of truth, Stephen Colbert (or at least an impostor… people are arguing if it was him or not) tonight on Wikipedia. Yes, I am Wikipedia Tawker and yes, I blocked. That “joke†used way too much of my bandwidth, my poor Tawkerbot4 couldn’t keep up!
In all, we ended up protecting 20 elephant related pages (I’m not listing them all here, I only have so much disk space, my stats for the the anti vandalism bots show 250 or so elephant related pages reverts. Most were, you guessed it, the fact that the population tripled – way too many times (repetition my friend).
Wikipedia is the world’s largest online reference, and firmly in the top 20 most visited sites worldwide. I guess this is what happens when you’re not a fringe site anymore.
delighted to hear about this new people’s internet warfare example here
however, it’s a pity that while i travel in china i cant get access to wikipedia which is blocked by the chinese government’s “web warfare team” (some sources said that it’s in the number of about 3,000 people, and growing)
hence the tactical practice of invasion and defence between colbert and tawker would not be useless but meaningful…
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