Wikipedia:Teachers can be vandals too

Wikipedia does not welcome the bright folks having dreamt up an innovative way to show the world how unreliable it is. They differ from other witty types (students, friends of gays, men with enormous equipment, and asdfghjklms), because they are armed with the iron-clad excuse that they are teachers, not vandals.

Examples

2010

In 2010 a French teacher set out to edit the French Wikipedia as part of a broader campaign about a poem by Charles de Vion d'Alibray (including online mock commentaries). He intended to demonstrate that pupils depend on the Internet to do their homework and that many websites are unreliable. The "fun little experiment" was related on his blog in 2012, and received media coverage.

Article timeline

August 2010: signs up as "Doleros"

• 18 August
  • Change "poet" to "tragedian" by Doleros (edit sum: temporary pedagogic error)
  • Reverted and user warned (no voluntary additions of erroneous material)

September 2010: new account under the name "Justin Delapierre"

I created an account to become a Wikipedia contributor and, to show my credentials, contributed usefully to a few literary articles. I then edited the very succinct Wikipedia biography of Charles de Vion d'Alibray by inserting this little addition: « His renowned and tragic love for Mademoiselle de Beaunais gave from 1636 onward a more lyrical and somber twist to his poetry. »

—Loys, Comment j'ai pourri le web (How i rotted the web)

• 4 September
  • Addition of erroneous material by Justin Delapierre
• 18 September
  • Self-revert by Justin Delapierre
• 19 September
  • Re-instated by anonymous editor

March 2012

• 21 March
  • Reverted (deletion of unsourced passage meant to deceive)
  • Indef-blocking of Justin Delapierre (account created to vandalize)
• 23 March
  • Addition of a new unsourced paragraph by anonymous editor
• 24 March
  • Reverted (Our dear vandal teacher has got followers… apparently one teaches best through showing an example…)
  • Re-instated by anonymous editor
  • Reverted
  • Page protected (Voluntary 'pedagogic' vandalism by a teacher on this article…)
• 26 March
  • Indef-blocking of Doleros (talk • contribs) (account created to vandalize then boast about it in the media)

April 2012

• 9 April
  • Re-instated by anonymous editor
  • Reverted

Wangenra

In October 2015, user Wangenra, claiming to be a teacher at Aloha High School, repeatedly edited the school's article to show "how easily entries can be changed". They were issued a "ludicrous" block which led to a horse-caressing discussion at AN/I.

The case shows some excuses that you can use to prevent edits from being reverted, such as:

• Doing this as a class exercise on source citation/evaluation.
• This is an exercise on why your site is not allowed as a research option for my writing students...
• This is me demonstrating to my class how easily entries can be changed.
• One last time this semester showing my students why I don't want them citing Wikipedia.

Aysedune

The former article Themes and analysis of No Country for Old Men (film) was tagged with {{subst:copyvio | url=insert URL here}}, and listed at Wikipedia:Copyright problems for review. User Aysedune deleted the template (which states it should not be removed), and was dismayed when an admin restored it:

"That was a good compilation and I always advise my students to read that page. When I realised it wasn't there any more and after learning I could take it back, I did it."

Educating students about Wikipedia's issues

Some more brilliant lesson plans similar to vandalizing Wikipedia to demonstrate its unreliability include:

• teaching racial equality by addressing minority students only with ethnic slurs,
• discouraging sexual harassment by having everyone in the class spank each other,
• teaching healthy dieting by having students take the cinnamon challenge or even the Tide Pod challenge,
• discouraging gang violence by joining a gang,
• teaching the importance of fire safety by playing with matches at a gas station.

Clearly, vandalizing Wikipedia is a much better option than explaining that:

• Wikipedia is not a stable source,
• Wikipedia is written by volunteers (not accredited scholars),
• Wikipedia avoids original research,
• Wikipedia only summarizes academic and journalistic sources (which are good sources for research papers).

See also

• Wikipedia:The motivation of a vandal
• The Inspect element, a much better way to "show" that Wikipedia is easy to insert incorrect information on without actually editing the article