Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Attack of the Nihilsocks

Can you get straight answers about Wikipedia on Yahoo! Answers? Sometimes, depending on whether or not Nihiltres and his thirty or so Nihilsocks are standing by to thumb them down, or to vote for the pro-Wikipedia duckspeaking answer. Inevitably a lot of the Nihilsocks have attained Level 2 by accumulating 250 points each, meaning that they can thumb answers up or down. If an answer gets enough thumbs down, it will be hidden from view. You can vote at any level, and so you often see Nihiltres winning Best Answer with 40 or 50 votes, which is funny when you consider that most questions in the Wikipedia category get less than 20 votes total.

But this is not to say that Nihiltres is the only person who believes in the glory of Wikipedia. The existence of Nihilsocks does not negate the fact that thousands of people have fundamental misconceptions about Wikipedia, and remain oblivious to its gross inaccuracy.

1 comment:

  1. This is idiotic. I'm not using sockpuppet accounts. Only one of my answers, as far as I'm aware, has ever reached 40 votes, and that one was on the top the voting section of one of the higher-level sections like "Internet" for a while; other answers to that question similarly have disproportionately high vote counts.

    You're attributing things to me that are incorrect. Funny how you'll complain about the potential for libel on Wikipedia (which is quite a valid concern) but then make unfounded negative assertions about me.

    On the contrary, I've been getting plenty of unreasonable thumbs-down myself. See for example this question, where another user commented on it.

    There are a number of obvious sockpuppet accounts in the Wikipedia section, both pro- and anti-Wikipedia, but I'm not playing that game.

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