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This teenager got seriously creative to get a better view at a music concert.

Adam Boyd said hebluffed his way into the VIP area at the Albert Hall in Manchester, northern England, on Friday night after editing The SherlocksWikipedia page on his cell phone to say he was the lead singers cousin.

He then showed the switched-up entry to a security guard, who let him slide into the roped-off section without issue.

I couldnt believe that hed actually let me in, Boyd told The Huffington Post on Wednesday.I was expecting someone to drag me out and ban me from the venue. But no, I was given free access to all the VIP section.

Boyd shared images of his escapade to Facebook the following day, and the post is now going viral.

Some commenters have suggested Boyd exaggerated the incident, but he insisted it was 100 percent the truth. Mashable also noteshow his name was indeed added to the page at 8:28 p.m. Friday night.

Wikipedia

Boyd isnt the first person to pull such a stunt. Peking Duk superfan David Spargo did pretty much the same back in 2015 to get backstage.

And Boyd probably wont be the last, as he himself revealed how people were now contacting him to say they planned on repeating the trick elsewhere.

The teen did describethe amount of publicity his stunt had generated as pretty overwhelming, however.I only posted this with the intention of entertaining the usual 40 people that like my statuses and thing Im funny, he said. I could have not anticipated anything quite the scale of this.

Read more:
Teen Edits Band's Wikipedia Page To Bluff His Way Into VIP Section - Huffington Post

Mashable

Teen sneaks into band's VIP section by editing their Wikipedia page Mashable A teenager has shared a Facebook post explaining how he snuck into a band's VIP area by editing their Wikipedia page. A British teen edits Wikipedia page of band to get into concert ...New Zealand Herald This Teenager Edited Himself Into A Band's Wikipedia Page To Get VIP TreatmentEsquire UK Teen sneaks into a VIP section at a gig by changing band's ...The Sun JOE -theMusic -Crewe Chronicle all 7 news articles »

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Teen sneaks into band's VIP section by editing their Wikipedia page - Mashable

Analysis When you live in a glass house, is it wise to start a rock-throwing competition?

Wikipedians this week added greatly to the amusement of the internet after around 40 contributors loftily declared that the Daily Mail was not a reliable source for citations. Much public hilarity ensued for the reason that The Mail and Wikipedia are really far more alike than either would care to admit.

(Let's leave aside the complication that "The Mail" is really three things: two newspapers which have a highly antagonistic relationship the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday and a sensationalist website, which is a different beast entirely.)

Both the Mail and Wikipedia have noble ambitions. One wishes to make the world's information free, and the other vows to defend proud provincial values from the metropolitan elites, to speak truth to power, and so on. But in reality, both depend heavily for their traffic on showbiz trivia. When we last looked a month ago, 20 of the top 25 Wikipedia pages were entertainment pages, with Star Wars and Zsa Zsa Gabor-related entries snaffling 10. Today the picture is largely the same. The notorious publicity hound Zsa Zsa Gabor has fallen out of the top 25 to be replaced by... Milo Yiannopoulos. The Mail's "sidebar of shame" specialises in celebrity "breasts and buttocks", drowning out the newspaper's highbrow contributors.

Both can resemble a real chamber of horrors. Since the rise of medieval torture porn cult ISIS, no other newspaper website has covered their atrocities as generously as the Mail Online. Staff tell stories that when the terror group "has a good one coming up", it puts a call into the Mail proper. It seems as though every centimetre of celebrity cellulite, and every teacher-pupil relationship is enthusiastically reported. For its part, Wikipedia's exhaustive detailing of sexual practices including masturbation photos thoughtfully uploaded by contributors is a wonder of the age.

Both also rely on reusing other people's work. That is to say both Wikipedia and the Mail Online reduce the roles of researching and editing common to both traditions to a process, to be fulfilled by low-paid staff or, in Wikipedia's case, unpaid volunteers. You can think of both as giant copying machines (one of Wikipedia's principles is NOR: "No Original Research"). I speak from experience here, after an exhaustive investigation that took four years to assemble, check and complete was shamelessly plagiarised the very next day, in a 2,000-word ripoff. The journalist responsible emailed to say he was very sorry, and shortly afterwards, severed his links with the Mail. But to this day, the plagiarised version still doesn't contain a link to the original, and cites no other source.

Both are also vigorous political campaigners although only the Mail admits to be. Wikipedia now pays lobbyists, has an endowment fund, and took a highly visible and partisan role against digital property rights (in the SOPA protests) and against privacy rights (after the ECJ's so-called "Right to be Forgotten" ruling).

Both are what Media Studies profs would call "cultural signifiers" they stand for something bigger. Wikipedia is a synonym for "crowdsourced knowledge" while the Mail is a synonym for a whole stack of values. Equally, there's mileage from declaring that whatever one may be for, one is safely against the other. For example, declaring that you never use Wikipedia, or that you wouldn't wipe your arse with the Daily Mail is a vivid expression of virtue-signalling. (Simply saying "dayley-mayell" is enough to get you on a BBC Radio 4 comedy. Probably for life.)

With Jimmy Wales now on the board of the Guardian Media Group the Mail's arch enemy this has a political dimension.

But both also claim to take the moral high ground with reliability and here both come unstuck. As newspapers failed to devise new digital revenue models, they became more clickbait-driven, and took originality and reliability less seriously. But they also became increasingly dependent on Wikipedia, as this story from a decade ago demonstrated. After 20 years at the BBC, few obituary writers could resist including a fabrication inserted into Wikipedia by a prankster. The Guardian, Reuters, The Times and even the BBC itself copied and pasted the unlikely factoid into their obits.

The problem Wikipedia has created for itself this week is that the newspapers don't really care if they recycle Wikipedia factoids the demand for "free fast facts" is something that Wikipedia largely exists to fulfil. But by making a grab for the moral high ground, Wikipedia must now disentangle itself from the Daily Mail, which is going to be difficult. And it also invites the world to examine just how reliable Wikipedia is, which is harder still.

Let's take the first one first.

There are between 5,000 and 50,000 links to the Daily Mail's websites from Wikipedia. Why the difference? Well, one search (try it) gives you some idea of the external links, but doesn't distinguish between active reader-facing Wikipedia articles, and old pages, talk pages or project discussion pages like RFCs. It's an overestimate. Whereas this search returns the number of articles, roughly 4,500, with at least one Mail citation. But an article may have multiple citations to the Mail sites: Wikipedia's entry for Adele currently has four, so the citation count will certainly be higher than 4,500.

Secondly, and this is the irony that has provided such enjoyment, Wikipedia is an inexhaustible supply of duff information, from ropey micro-factoids that nobody spots, to ambitious and witty hoaxes such as the Brazilian aardvark, or the Bicholim conflict, which can lie uncorrected for years. Wikipedia "won" the online information wars by being fast and cheap, not by being reliable. If one is to deplore the Mail's personal attacks on public figures, it helps not to have BLPs (biographies of living persons) that carry a huge red warning sign over them.

Read more:
The Mail vs Wikipedia: They're more alike than they'd ever admit ... - The Register

Move Over, Wikipedia. Dictionaries Are Hot Again. New York Times In the hours after Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, was silenced by her Republican colleagues for impugning a fellow senator by reading aloud a letter Coretta Scott King had written that was critical of Jeff Sessions, Republican ... and more »

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Move Over, Wikipedia. Dictionaries Are Hot Again. - New York Times

3D representation of 30 days of Wikipedia talk-page revisions, of which 1092 contained toxic language (shown as red if live, gray if reverted) and 164,102 were non-toxic (shown as dots).

Quantification of types of harassment experienced by Wikipedia users.

Wikipedia

Percentage of attacking comments attributed to Wikipedia editors at different activity levels.

Chart by Nithum Thain/Hlud

We've all heard anecdotes about trolling on Wikipedia and other social platforms, but rarely has anyone been able to quantify levels and origins of online abuse. That's about to change. Researchers with Alphabet tech incubator Jigsaw worked with Wikimedia Foundation to analyze 100,000 comments left on English-language Wikipedia. They found predictable patterns behind who will launch personal attacks and when.

The goal of the research team was to lay the groundwork for an automated system to "reduce toxic discussions" on Wikipedia. The team's work could one day lead to the creation of a warning system for moderators. The researchers caution that this system would require more research to implement, but they have released a paper with some fascinating early findings.

To make the supervised machine-learning task simple, the Jigsaw researchers focused exclusively on ad hominem or personal attacks, which are relatively easy to identify. They defined personal attacks as directed at a commenter (i.e., "you suck"), directed at a third party ("Bill sucks"), quoting an attack ("Bill says Henri sucks"), or just "another kind of attack or harassment." They used Crowdflower to crowdsource the job of reviewing 100,000 Wikipedia comments made between 2004-2015. Ultimately, they used over 4,000 Crowdflower workers to complete the task, and each comment was annotated by 10 different people as an attack or not.

Once the researchers had their dataset, they trained a logistic regression algorithm to recognize whether a comment was a personal attack or not. "With testing, we found that a fully trained model achieves better performance in predicting whether an edit is a personal attack than the combined average of three human crowd-workers," they write in a summary of their paper on Medium.

The researchers unleashed their algorithm on Wikipedia comments made during 2015, constantly checking results for accuracy. Almost immediately, they found that they could debunk the time-worn idea that anonymity leads to abuse. Although anonymous comments are "six times more likely to be an attack," they are less than half of all attacks on Wikipedia. "Similarly, less than half of attacks come from users with little prior participation," the researchers write in their paper. "Perhaps surprisingly, approximately 30% of attacks come from registered users with over a 100 contributions." In other words, a third of all personal attacks come from regular Wikipedia editors who contribute several edits per month. Personal attacks seem to be baked into Wikipedia culture.

The researchers also found that a large percentage of attacks come from a very small number of "highly toxic" Wikipedia contributors. Eighty percent of personal attacks on Wikipedia come from people who rarely make personal attacks. But a whopping 9% of attacks in 2015 came from 34 users who had made 20 or more personal attacks during the year. "Significant progress could be made by moderating a relatively small number of frequent attackers," the researchers note. This finding bolsters the idea that problems in online communities often come from a small minority of highly vocal users.

Depressingly, the study also found that very few personal attacks are moderated. Only 17.9% of personal attacks lead to a warning or ban. Attackers are more likely to be moderated if they have launched a number of attacks or have been moderated before. But still, this is an abysmal rate of moderation for the most obvious and blatant form of abuse that can happen in a community.

The researchers conclude their paper by calling for more research. Wikipedia has released a dump of all talk-page comments to the site between 2004-1015 via Figshare, so other researchers will have access to the same dataset that the Jigsaw team did. Understanding how attacks affect other users is urgent, say the researchers. Do repeated attacks lead to user abandonment? Are some groups attacked more often than others? The more we know, the closer we get to having good tools to aid moderators. Such tools, the researchers write, "might be used to help moderators build dashboards that better visualize the health of Wikipedia conversations or to develop systems to better triage comments for review."

Listing image by Hoshi Ludwig

See the original post here:
Handful of highly toxic Wikipedia editors cause 9% of abuse on the site - Ars Technica