I’ve never played backgammon, but I’d like to learn. So I went over to Wikipedia to see how it’s played. The page is not what I expected. There are multiple, identical paragraphs saying ‘The President of Iraq is Iraq’s head of state…’ and ‘Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU Linz, or just JKU – the full German name is Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, the short version is Universität Linz, University of Linz in English…’ followed by 360 links (mostly external links) and more information about Iraq, Presidents of Iraq, and the university. Only at the bottom of the page (starting with link 361) does the page get into the game.
What’s going on? Somebody (or somebodies) hates backgammon so much they decided to spam the page?
Looks like that’s the case. FWIW, the page is back to normal now. You can see the history of any page by clicking its “history” link at the top (here’s Backgammon’s), and click on any of the dated links to see any revision from the article’s beginning.
None of that is there anymore. It’s back to just being about backgammon.
I’ve been noticing this kind of random vadalism a lot lately. Someone changed Chaucer’s place of birth to El Salvador. Someone put “i like bacon” on the E. Coli page. Someone put some strange misinformation on a page about one of England’s kings (can’t remember what it was now). To the credit of the Wiki-watchers, it is almost always reverted by the time you refresh the page, or at most within a few hours.
I looked at the history page, but didn’t see anything about the page being changed back to normal. (Actually, I don’t seem to be using the page correctly; as I didn’t see the information in the format I was expecting.) But I did see an animated ‘Magic Eye’ image of a swimming shark. First time I’ve seen an animated one.
The graffiti was reverted two hours after it happened on 12/30.
If you ever run across graffiti on Wikipedia, it is easy to revert to a prior edit to eliminate it. Learning how is one way to start in the wonderful world of Wikipedia authorship.
Don’t forget that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was briefly credited as having been Vice President lately.
On the subject of backgammon: Look for Paul Magriel’s Backgammon. It’s out of print, but it’s absolutely the best book on the subject. If you understand and apply the principles in that book, you should become at least a competent player in fairly short order.
The history page contains a list of revisions to the page (not the contents of the page itself). Think of it as an index. Anytime anyone changes the article (from adding or removing a comma or period to blanking the page altogether), an entry is made on the history page automatically, which links to that version of the page, whatever it is. Therefore, you can see the evolution of the page, who did what, when, and if it’s still in the current page. The comments won’t generally say “page back to normal.” In this case, Scipius’ edit that says “reverted edits made by …” is the one that changed it back to normal. You can click on “Compare selected versions” to see the changes between any two versions as well.
Lots of luck with backgammon, it’s a great game. After learning basic stratagy you might give this book a read. It’s not the end all be all but it can broaden your stratagy base.
Steven
Okay, I see when comparing versions that ‘Makeldf343’ added the spam, and ‘Scipius’ reverted the changes. But the notation says:
I posted this thread just after finding the spam, which is after the timestamp. I also looked at the page yesterday. Maybe Safari reloaded the page from cache?
More subtle versions of this type of thing are starting to play heavily in Wikipedia’s favor. Even people here often discount Wikipedia as a poor anarchist version of any real cite. However, every study that has looked the issue that I have read hasn’t found that. I read an article on a plane recently (sorry) where the authors decided to put small errors on rather esoteric subjects intentianally in Wikipedia pages to find out how long it would take for them to get corrected. Would it take one week, one month, or never for someone to notice and care enough to correct say a date from March 1573 to May 1573. The results stunned them when every single flaw they introduced was corrected withing 3 hours and most within 1 hour.
That is the big mystery of web behavior that no one understands completely. We know what the networks and software can do but we don’t understand the hive behavior that some software and ideas can generate yet others don’t/
I’m an advocate for Wikipedia, but that has not been my experience at all.
I’m fairly active on wikipedia, having created dozens of articles and made about 1000 edits in the last year. One of the things that’s clear to me is that a lot of people write/edit articles who don’t know what they’re taking about, adding things off the top of their heads that aren’t accurate. In the course of my current resarch, I’ve looked at hundreds of biographies of football players, from the great to the obscure About half of them had uncorrected factual errors, misstatements, or repeated apocrophyl stories. Some of these have been around for months and years.
I’m enough of an expert on the subject (editor of the Football Encyclopedia and a dozen other books on sports history) that I recognize some of the errors as glaring, but most are subtle enough to escape detection. I also know the existing field well enough to spot outright copyright volations, and I find a lot of those, too.
That’s not to say, of course, that other reference sources are perfect. The web is full of faulty reference content, and it proliferates from one site to another. Print sources can also be faulty. Anytime you use a single reference source, you open yourself to being misinformed. Is wikipedia’s accuracy comparable to other reference sources? Maybe. Is it perfect? Of course not.
Mine neither. Anybody reading the Wiki page for my village would have thought that it was called “Anuspull” for the best part of a week, earlier this month.
That’s very possible. Wikipedia also does use its own reverse-proxy servers that serve cached pages so it doesn’t have to hit the database each time. Sometimes, when loads are high, those caches don’t get updated right away when changes are made.
So there’s at least two levels of caching that could have interfered with you getting the most current version.
Fast moving topics at Wikipedia sometimes have hundreds of changes a day!
I had a very similar experience for the page on Vienna. The entry had some garbage at the top, but when I went to look at the history, it had already been fixed. In the process of going to the history and back, I got the corrected page. It is possible I had a cached copy locally, but I was also wondering if there is a lag in changes throughout the collection of wiki servers?
