Link to the article: Wikipedia's "Sockpuppet" Problem
It would appear as though Wikipedia—our favorite and (relatively) reliable source of information online—has been met with a scandal of sorts. Recently the admins have discovered the presence of what they’re calling an underground “sockpuppet” ring, which consisted of about 250 bogus accounts that have been “editing articles on behalf of paying clients.” An account by the name of Morning277 was supposedly the catalyst from which the larger network of bogus accounts stemmed, and together these accounts would edit pages collaboratively while often providing broken links or insufficient reference material to back up their alterations to the online articles. Though names were excluded from the admin’s report, Simon Owens of the Daily Dot claims to have information linking “Wiki-PR” to the bogus accounts—listing “page creation and editing, page management, and crisis editing” under their list of services. Will Oremus goes on to detail other downfalls that Wikipedia has experienced in recent years and he notes that “it will be hard-pressed to significantly improve until it can figure out how to attract more talented and dedicated editors with different interests and backgrounds from around the world.”
In a way I believe that this event relates to our recent discussions of online collaboration and its dual-sided nature. If anything, Wikipedia might be considered one of the most iconic (and successful) examples of online collaborative work, especially seeing as a study conducted in 2005 “found that the quality of science articles on [Wikipedia] rivaled that of Encyclopaedia Britannica.” However, in their recent difficulty with “sockpuppeting” and dubious accounts, perhaps our internet-centric views on collaboration have fallen to more reasonable expectations. There are undeniable benefits from crowdsourcing information online, but—even after having this influx of content reviewed by 600 admins on Wikipedia—there exist faults in the system that users will exploit for their own ends. Just imagine how bad this exploitation could get on a site that was monitored less than Wikipedia and you’ll more readily see the inherent flaws and setbacks that crowdsourcing information has the potential to cause. It’s not all doom and gloom though. If you consider the countless wikis across the web that have sprung up over the last decade (from the innumerable video game wikis to our own class’s site), you will find that they each have a dedicated following and active community that help to preserve the integrity/validity of their site’s content. I guess what I’m trying to get at is the concept that there are inherent benefits and downfalls to almost anything that we can think to apply online or in the world (as “The Techno-Human Condition” advocated to us several weeks ago), and these sorts of events ought not discourage our endeavors; rather, they should reaffirm our vigilance in communal interactivity through the recognition that there are inevitable problems that we will stumble upon and that will ultimately remedy existing problems in an effort to improve the online community.
Further Resources Mentioned in the Article: