Stephen Colbert did a humorous segment on truthiness last night, this time on the topic of historical revisionism. You can view the clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmHm0rGns4I.

What made this segment particularly famous (or infamous) were Stephen's (Mr. Colbert's?) comments regarding the illustrious Wikipedia: After indicating that he was revising some entries to alter history, pretending to do it on a laptop during taping (a supposed Stephencolbert user pretty much simultaneously -- to the airing, not the taping -- made a couple of edits correlating with the show. These edits were on the topic of George Washington and  The Colbert Report recurring elements, exactly as indicated on the show. This user could just as easily have been a third party following along, but the effect is the same, and is just as humorous), he then coined the new word Wikiality.

What really raised the ire of the Wikipedia defenders, however, was Mr. Colbert's humorous petition for users to support him in his quest for historical revisionism, altering the Wikipedia entry for elephants to support a fictional 3x increase in the total population over the past 6 months ("Explain that Al Gore!"). Many played along, until eventually the page in question (and virtually all other pages related to elephants) was locked to avoid this jovial vandalism.

Personally I think Stephen made a brilliant point, even if there was a bit of collateral damage. Some of the reaction to it has simply been ridiculous.

• This isn't really an indictment of Wikipedia (and in fact further solidifies its place in mainstream culture).
  
  
• It isn't a "validation of Wikipedia" that these vandalisms were caught and reverted, or that protections were put in place (basically undermining the core principals of Wikipedia, albeit temporarily). 
  
  The people and groups truly dedicated to revisionism generally don't advertise their actions nationwide (which brings up the scary fact that a remarkable number of people viewing the Colbert Report don't realize that it's satire).
  
  If a completely independent enthusiast of sugar-and-sugar-producers decides to alter sections of the sucralose entry to highlight (exaggerate?) possible health risks, would the Wikipedia editors (who themselves aren't immune from suspicion) know that it's misinformation? Would a sucralose defender be just as motivated to monitor the site to ensure that the representation remains fair and balanced, or would they be skewing things the opposite way? Is it misinformation if it's using the ambiguity of the English language to accentuate some points that support one's interests, while undermining those that counter it?
  
  
• Such a user-contributed system will invariably have submarined biases depending upon who is the most motivated to contribute and to police. The perspective of widespread internet-enabled countries, for instance, will be magnified and dominant (have you ever notice how widespread the Canadian perspective is on the English internet? We have quite a few people with high-speed cluttering the English language sites. It's often cold with nothing to do, so we spend a lot of time online). The perspective of special interests and motivated minorities will be magnified.
  
  I don't mean to single this particular group out, but I recently heard about a group of Israel supporters that have taken to swarming sites and online polls to skew it towards the Israeli perspective. They've even gone and built a system tray application to make sure supporters are alerted when distributed vote stuffing is called for.
  
  
• Stephen Colbert didn't suddenly make nefarious agents aware of something they previously had no idea about -- there have been professional groups, with offices and everything, working to subvert information to favour certain interests for decades, and they've certainly used their techniques on the net as well. Thinking that it was safe until Stephen Colbert mentioned it is as logical as saying the water supply is safe until someone postulated that it could be poisoned by terrorists.

Of course these, err, truths hold for more than just Wikipedia: Virtually any user-contributed site faces the same problems.

Reddit, for instance -- an up and coming meme site -- lets users "vote" which links and comments are most, well, in line with one's own view (while the links get rated on a what is occasionally a meritocracy, the voting on comments is usually extremely one sided, having very little to do with presenting a valid, well-spoken argument, and more to do with saying something that correlates with every fly-by voters opinion. It is actually embarrassing seeing your own comment scored up because you happen to share the majority view, while the well-written and convincing posts of your adversary sink into underflow territory).

Using an apparently basic votes-over-time algorithms, the app determines which links to put on the front page -- Getting on the front page is obviously a desirable place to be for someone try to push a perspective or an agenda (remember that the majority of users on most of these sites are lurkers - while many people are set in their position, and are valiant, tireless crusaders for the cause, there are a lot of people who are on the fence, absorbing whatever information on a topic is presented to them, willing to change their position based upon new inputs). My personal experience here has been that a Reddit front page isn't anything like a Digg front page in the volume of traffic it sends to you, but it still brings in a considerable number of users ready and waiting to be stuffed with one's perspective.

So how does one get on the front page? Well aside from pandering to the natural bias of the Reddit crowd (a crowd that leans towards libertarianism/anti-authority/extreme liberalism/Lispism, a demographic that is heavily reflected in the vote patterns), getting on the front page can be accomplished with little more than a dozen votes over a short period of time (one vote per IP, folks). Staying on the front page for a work day can be accomplished with just a couple hundred up votes.

Topping the all time record books in the Reddit universe takes less than 900 up votes after the negations have been subtracted out.

How hard is it for a special interest to manipulate a site like this? The Israeli support site up above is fairly open and inclusive in their advocacy, but surely all such groups aren't so forthright -- Microsoft has some 60,000 employees, and while they have a limited number of work IPs, there are certainly 10s of thousands of home IPs that can be used to push an agenda. The same goes for oil companies, and virtually any other large organization.

While I hardly think an organization like Microsoft is going to enlist employees in a concerted astroturfing drive, is it difficult to imagine that there are similar groups doing something similar right now? I've already pointed out the Israel support orchestration above (and for those who would argue that their votes are legitimate, the problem is that it's completely disproportionate. It's why user-initiated poll submissions and feedback comments are usually absurdly skewed and not-correlating with reality - the people voting often have a vested interest motivating their actions), and every bit of common sense says that they aren't alone.

Once this approach has been mastered at Reddit, move on the larger meme sites like Digg - a couple of thousand votes on Digg is all it takes. Hire some botnet authors if need be.

(Note: This isn't intended to be a "how to", but this issue has bothered me for a while. Before hearing about the Giyus site mentioned above, I had already considered making an opinion swarming coordination web app, allowing groups to administer and privately coordinate opinion bombing runs. My goal was to highlight a potential problem, rather than enabling this sort of activity)