Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-06-14/In the news

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"here's a list of 50 cases of bank robberies that went wrong, let's go through each one" - this is exactly the way it goes. Not all fifty, but the most notable cases are studied. Titanic, Bhopal, Tenerife, deaths of Kennedy and Rabin etc. are the lessons, and they are indeed studied by students in relevant fields. A bank robbery is not much different from the BP oil spill: these lessons must be studied to be learnt. East of Borschov (talk) 05:51, 16 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- In light of Jimmy's comments (which for once I agree with) I've taken the liberty of moving User:Shii/Hoaxes to Wikipedia:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia, which should indeed prove a helpful reference for students interested in the promulgation of hoaxes on our project. Dcoetzee 23:30, 16 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Is Wikipedia a cult?

Sam Vaknin has published a reply to this Signpost article. I am addressing the relevant part below (the rest of Vaknin's response consists of explanations why he considers himself as a Wikipedia expert superior to Reagle, and a copy of the Signpost article, with links removed). Vaknin's statements are quoted in italic.

In response to Dan Tynan's excellent article about Wikipedia (http://infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/faith-in-numbers-six-more-tech-cults-846?page=0,2), Wikipedia struck back, in an article typically riddled with blatant lies and not so subtle distortions (see the text below).

First, while it is true that Vaknin has had many fights with Wikipedians in the past, none of those users has been involved in writing this Signpost article. His name came up recently as one of the many writers/commenters about Wikipedia (notable or less so) whose publications we review each week for coverage in the Signpost's "In the news" section.

If a Signpost article is demonstrated to contain a factual inaccuracy, we are happy to note a correction. However, Vaknin's response does not contain a convincing demonstration of such inaccuracies, as shown below. By the way, even Larry Sanger seems to have reservations about the quality of Vaknin's response.

Two examples:

1. The Wikipedia article about me was deleted only after I threatened to initiate a class action lawsuit against Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and Wikimedia. Immediately afterwards, I was removed as a user. To this very day, no one can add an article about "Sam Vaknin" to Wikipedia. Try it!

According to the deletion log, the article was first deleted on 15:08, 15 February 2006 as a result of a deletion debate that lasted nine days and does not contain any evidence that legal pressure by Vaknin or interference by Wikimedia staff had played a role in its outcome. The article was later recreated, and deleted again on 27 June 2006 (reason given: "This was already decided to be deleted. Gone."), inserted again and last deleted on 3 July 2006 (reason given: "This was on AFD, and it got deleted!!!! DON'T RECREATE!!!!"). From this, is appears that the protection against recreation that Vaknin mentions was to enforce the result of the February 2006 AfD - not out of fear of a "class action lawsuit". Here, the deleting admin explicitly denies that he was even aware of Vaknin's legal threats. (Some other of Vaknin's claims are also rebutted there, such as those about his involvement in Nupedia.)
According to the block log, User:Samvak was first blocked on 23 June 2006 for sockpuppeting, for one week, which was extended by one week on June 28, followed by an indefinite block on 13 August 2006.
Vaknin's article The Six Sins of the Wikipedia was published on June 26, 2006, three days after his first block, while Vaknin was still prohibited from editing Wikipedia.

In summary, the data in the logs and on the Global Politician's site fully supports the statement in the Signpost article that Sam Vaknin tries to portray as "lie" or "distortion": "In 2006, after an article about Vaknin had been deleted and User:Samvak had been blocked (for sockpuppet activities involving the article Narcissistic personality disorder and other topics related to Vaknin's work), Global Politician had published an earlier article by Vaknin that was critical of Wikipedia: The Six Sins of the Wikipedia".

2. The Wikipedians - leveraging the Wikipedia's ubiquity and Google ranking - are the one's who started the libelous campaign against me, claiming that my Ph.D. is of the diploma-mill variety. The truth? http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/rebuttal.html

I don't know who first questioned the provenance of Vaknin's doctorate. It is true that doubts about his academic credentials played a role in the February 2006 deletion discussion. But the Signpost article did not cite any such opinions of Wikipedians, instead it just quoted one sentence from an article by Snopes. Snopes has a very good reputation about factual accuracy.

In his "rebuttal", Vaknin tries to create the impression that this is based on a confusion between Pacific Western University (Hawaii) and a legitimate university of the same name in California ("I studied in 1982-3 in ENCINO, California. ... I have never been to Hawaii, let alone studied there"). However, the Snopes article is not talking about PWU (Hawaii), but about Pacific Western University (California) (it links to this draft which makes clear that the PWU that was based in Encino is the same as the one later based in San Diego). For more context about the former Pacific Western University based in San Diego, see Pacific_Western_University#Controversies_prior_to_2006 and the links there, especially this article by Inside Higher Ed or this article by The Scientist on a 2005 scandal about a Ph.D. title from PWU (California), i.e. a Ph.D. title such as Vaknin's .

Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:05, 19 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

French politician falls for Wikipedia hoax

Since the publication of this Signpost article, the tourist tour "La Route de L'Astran" in [1] has been renamed "La Route de L'Ocean", and the following text has been removed:

"Léon Robert de L’Astran, représente bien sa ville natale, La Rochelle dite « La rebelle ». Marin, naturaliste, savant, il effectua plusieurs voyages aux Amériques dont un avec La Fayette, à bord de la Frégate Hermione. Grand humaniste, il s'opposa fermement à la traite des noirs et refusa que les navires dont il avait hérité de son père soient utilisés pour cela."

The old version can still be seen in Google's cache.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 07:17, 21 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]