Experiment concludes: Most misinformation inserted into Wikipedia may persist by Gregory Kohs.
A months-long experiment to deliberately insert misinformation into thirty different Wikipedia articles has been brought to an end, and the results may surprise you. In 63% of cases, the phony information persisted not for minutes or hours, but for weeks and months. Have you ever heard of Ecuadorian students dressed in formal three-piece suits, leading hiking tours of the Galapagos Islands? Did you know that during the testing of one of the first machines to make paper bags, two thumbs and a toe were lost to the cutting blade? And would it surprise you to learn that pain from inflammation is caused by the human body’s release of rhyolite, an igneous, volcanic rock?
None of these are true, but Wikipedia has been presenting these “facts” as truth now for more than six weeks. And the misinformation isn’t buried on seldom-viewed pages, either. Those three howlers alone have been viewed by over 125,000 Wikipedia readers thus far.
The second craziest thing of all may be that when I sought to roll back the damage I had caused Wikipedia, after fixing eight of the thirty articles, my User account was blocked by a site administrator. The most bizarre thing is what happened next: another editor set himself to work restoring the falsehoods, following the theory that a blocked editor’s edits must be reverted on sight.
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Alex Brown tweeted this story along with the comment:
Wikipedia’s purported “self-correcting” prowess is more myth than reality
True, but not to pick on Wikipedia, the same is true for the benefits of peer review in general. A cursory survey of the posts at Retraction Watch will leave you wondering what peer reviewers are doing because it certainly isn’t reading assigned papers. At least not closely.
For historical references on peer review, see: Three myths about scientific peer review by Michael Nielsen.
Peer review is also used in grant processes, prompting the Wall Street Journal to call for lotteries to award NIH grants.
There are literally hundreds of other sources and accounts that demonstrate whatever functions peer review may have, quality assurance isn’t one of them. I suspect “gate keeping,” by academics who are only “gate keepers,” is its primary function.
The common thread running through all of these accounts is that you and only you can choose to read responsibly.
As a reader: Read critically! Do the statements in an article, post, etc., fit with what you know about the subject? Or with general experience? What sources did the author cite? Simply citing Pompous Work I does not mean Pompous Work I said anything about the subject. Check the citations by reading the citations. (You will be very surprised in some cases.) After doing your homework, if you still have doubts, such as with reported experiments, contact the author and explain what you have done thus far and your questions (nicely).
Even agreement between Pompous Work I and the author doesn’t mean you don’t have a good question. Pompous works are corrected year in and year out.
As an author: Do not cite papers you have not read. Do not cite papers because another author said a paper said. Verify your citations do exist and that they in fact support your claims. Post all of your data publicly. (No caveats, claims without supporting evidence are simply noise.)