One of the weaker points of Wikipedia is the way editors lazily refer to journalistic "reliable" sources as authoritative when a significant amount of the time the journalist is lazily using WP as their own source.
Just a couple of these circular references build up a circumstantial base of "evidence" which is then itself used to bolster the original weak claims which often reflect nothing more than an editorial or journalistic assumption or bias.
When I was bored in school I ran down the original source for the claim on the Honey Badger wikipedia page that they can take several bullets and keep coming.
It turns out that the source was a book, which was citing a news story, which was about a letter a farmer had written in. I recall tagging this in the backed with 'weak source' (or something).
Checking back now, the claim has been changed to: "The only sure way of killing them quickly is through a blow to the skull with a club or a shot to the head with a gun, as their skin is almost impervious to arrows and spears."
Which is more plausible a claim than the original, and I'm absolutely prepared to believe killing a Honey Badger with arrows is hard, but the source still isn't actually proving that.
Anyway it was a useful lesson for younger me about Wikipedia.
Experienced wikipedia editors are often pretty good at catching this circular sourcing on important articles, but, yeah, it's definitely much more of a problem for more obscure things like the history of toasters.
Years ago I noticed that the article for the mimic octopus said that it mimicked various things, including the "venomous sole" (!) with a citation that looked suspiciously similar to the wikipedia article. Of course, there's no such thing, but if you search the web you can still find articles based on the wikipedia article claiming it (the wikipedia article itself was eventually corrected to the (non-venomous) zebra sole).
I just fixed a bug like that in Wikipedia: atmospheric methane lifetime is widely quoted as being "a half life of 9.1 years". That appears in the wikipedia, with a reference to a massive document (part of IPCC's AR5) which in fact makes no such claim (about a half life I mean). But once it's entered the Zeitgeist, can the false assumption be eradicated?
(I only noticed this because the 9.1 y estimate may no longer be valid, and we are putting together a paper on the subject.)
Wikipedia implicitly (or maybe explicitly if you read the policies) relies on sources that have gatekeepers, however unknowledgeable/biased/cursory those gatekeepers are in practice. And it probably also favors print publication even though that means readers (and editors) often can't practically verify the information for themselves.
I think ultimately the problem is that Wikipedia assumes journalists should be treated by default with a degree of respect above “professional gossip monkeys”.
Fifteen years ago, someone poorly read the 1999 Guiness book of records and wrongly concluded that Guiness called the Game Boy Camera the world's smallest digital camera. Aside from the fact that Guiness World Records are a pile of crap and untrusthworthy, it made no such claim. To the contrary, it claimed other digital cameras as the smallest.
Now think, how many time have you heard that fact when reading retrospectives on Game Boy, or watching Youtube videos?
IOW, both Wikipedia and Journalism can be a lot like Santa Claus — there is a lot of "evidence" of his existence, it is just that exactly zero of it is good, i.e., grounded in objective reality. But it makes a nice story, towards which most people seem to gravitate.
In another front page discussion is what looks like a emerging consensus that grand larceny like the FTX theft is a function of the non existent fact checking of the media.
What possible motivation could exist for establishing a online reference using the media as the canonical and sole source of truth?
My favorite Wikipedia story is when I tried to update the page for the "Homebrew Mobile Phone Club" to reflect the location of the first meeting. Someone (probably not at all maliciously) commented that the club's first meeting was at the Tech Shop in Menlo Park. This was untrue. It was at the Google offices at the GooglePlex in Mountain View near Moffett Field. I know because I was the organizer of the first meeting.
As proof that the first meeting was at the Tech Shop one of the editors cited a Wired article where the author mentioned they attended a meeting there in Menlo Park. We absolutely held meetings there and I am forever grateful to Jim Newton for sponsoring us. Nowhere in the article (I believe by Robert Strohmeyer) did it mention this was the first meeting. And actually... I'm re-reading it... it talks about meeting at a law firm in Palo Alto, which I think was where we had our second and third meetings, so the conversation about the Tech Shop meetings being the first meeting is even weirder.
Anyway... no amount of discussion could convince the volunteer wikipedia editor that our first meeting was at the GooglePlex, even the post on Boing Boing announcing it (thank you Cory Doctorow for amplifying the message.) They just decided they were right and I was wrong.
In the end they nominated the article for deletion and by that time I was totally okay with it. The club had dissolved after the release of Android and the iPhone, where you could actually write your own phone apps. And now with the Pine Phone (and other platforms I can't remember the name of) it's not clear what the club would be advocating for.
Anyway, I still think the Wikipedia is a great place to go find references about a subject you're not familiar with. But you absolutely need to do due diligence and continue finding references if your search is important.
And to be clear... my point is... sometimes human editors imply "facts" are in references when they clearly are not. In this case it was a minor, unimportant detail -- the location of the first meeting. But I have noticed several times wikipedia editors including "facts" that aren't supported by the citations. Caveat Lector.
A while ago most people thought QuakeWorld was the first game to do client-side prediction. Carmack has a .plan from 1996 talking about it so there's a clear reference.
But one day I went to the wiki page for client-side prediction and it said Duke Nukem 3D was first which I thought was curious, so I checked the reference on it and it was a recent interview with Ken Silverman - creator of the Build engine that DN3D ran on - which clearly stated DN3D was first:
> "People may point out that Quake’s networking code was better due to its drop-in networking support, [but] it did not support client side prediction in the beginning,” he explains. “That’s something I had come up with first and implemented in the January 1996 release of Duke 3D shareware."
Pretty unfair for Ken, I thought, that everyone’s got the wrong idea that it’s QuakeWorld. Since the source is available, with the help of Hacker News we even found the code for it in game.c[0].
To be a good citizen I went back over to the Wikipedia page and added a link to the source code to help solidify the claim. But while I was there I went back and read the interview again, and noticed a part I’d skimmed the first time:
> "It kind of pisses me off that the Wikipedia page article on ‘client side prediction’ gives credit to Quakeworld due to a lack of credible citations about Duke 3D."
I wondered if and when it had been changed from saying Duke 3D to QuakeWorld in the past (before eventually being changed back again sometime after the interview), so I went and had a look through the page history. It had been changed a few years ago due to lack of any citations. And the person who had removed it... was me.
Given the broad (though admittedly shallow) impact this had in Scotland, and how long it was perpetuated, perhaps the hoax itself deserves an article? The people who learned false stuff about him aren't going to unlearn it because the article was deleted. There needs to be something to set the record straight.
Is that a tie wrap around the power cord of that 1909 toaster pictured at the end of the article? How old are those?
EDIT: Wikipedia (... yeah I know) says tie wraps were invented somewhere between 1956 and 1958. So the picture cannot be the earliest picture of the earliest toaster either I guess?
It could be a picture of the earliest toaster, but the tie was added at a later date. No claim it's original packaging! I imagine it's from a museum or collection and you don't want the cord dangling around.
The hoax plot thickens! It seems like it's a later photo of a replica of the original (or just the guts of a random toaster) that's meant to look like it's from 1909. The 2-prong plug also looks surprisingly modern.
It's not just Wikipedia. People still believe that Saddam Hussein had mobile chemical/biological weapons labs. And that helped justify a war. So in perspective, I'm OK with people being ignorant of the inventor of the toaster for a while.
They are though? They have the name Alan MacMasters, same as the fake inventor
> "Alan MacMasters, 30, is an aerospace engineer from London "and not the inventor of the toaster", he assures me with a giggle. "You shouldn't just believe everything you read on the internet."
> I feel nervous about the possibility of falling prey to another prank. So I ask Alan to send me a photo of his passport, which he does. He is not lying: even if he lacks the voluminous quiff of his namesake, he really is Alan MacMasters
I think the above comment is referring to the true identity of “Maddy Kennedy”:
> On 6 February 2012, Alan was at a university lecture, when the class was warned against using Wikipedia as a source. To hammer the point home, the lecturer said that a friend of his - one "Maddy Kennedy" - had named himself on the site as the inventor of the toaster.
mellosouls|3 years ago
Just a couple of these circular references build up a circumstantial base of "evidence" which is then itself used to bolster the original weak claims which often reflect nothing more than an editorial or journalistic assumption or bias.
Ardon|3 years ago
It turns out that the source was a book, which was citing a news story, which was about a letter a farmer had written in. I recall tagging this in the backed with 'weak source' (or something).
Checking back now, the claim has been changed to: "The only sure way of killing them quickly is through a blow to the skull with a club or a shot to the head with a gun, as their skin is almost impervious to arrows and spears."
Which is more plausible a claim than the original, and I'm absolutely prepared to believe killing a Honey Badger with arrows is hard, but the source still isn't actually proving that.
Anyway it was a useful lesson for younger me about Wikipedia.
rsynnott|3 years ago
Years ago I noticed that the article for the mimic octopus said that it mimicked various things, including the "venomous sole" (!) with a citation that looked suspiciously similar to the wikipedia article. Of course, there's no such thing, but if you search the web you can still find articles based on the wikipedia article claiming it (the wikipedia article itself was eventually corrected to the (non-venomous) zebra sole).
porthz|3 years ago
Then the entire world press copies the article within hours. Even Reuters and AP have adopted the practice.
Then Wikipedia cites the narrative as the truth.
gumby|3 years ago
(I only noticed this because the 9.1 y estimate may no longer be valid, and we are putting together a paper on the subject.)
Nition|3 years ago
> "These [claims] would get picked up in different types of media, I would cite them, and they would become fact," Alex says.
ghaff|3 years ago
setr|3 years ago
philistine|3 years ago
Now think, how many time have you heard that fact when reading retrospectives on Game Boy, or watching Youtube videos?
toss1|3 years ago
teddyh|3 years ago
retconn|3 years ago
What possible motivation could exist for establishing a online reference using the media as the canonical and sole source of truth?
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
Haga|3 years ago
[deleted]
meadhbh-hamrick|3 years ago
As proof that the first meeting was at the Tech Shop one of the editors cited a Wired article where the author mentioned they attended a meeting there in Menlo Park. We absolutely held meetings there and I am forever grateful to Jim Newton for sponsoring us. Nowhere in the article (I believe by Robert Strohmeyer) did it mention this was the first meeting. And actually... I'm re-reading it... it talks about meeting at a law firm in Palo Alto, which I think was where we had our second and third meetings, so the conversation about the Tech Shop meetings being the first meeting is even weirder.
Anyway... no amount of discussion could convince the volunteer wikipedia editor that our first meeting was at the GooglePlex, even the post on Boing Boing announcing it (thank you Cory Doctorow for amplifying the message.) They just decided they were right and I was wrong.
In the end they nominated the article for deletion and by that time I was totally okay with it. The club had dissolved after the release of Android and the iPhone, where you could actually write your own phone apps. And now with the Pine Phone (and other platforms I can't remember the name of) it's not clear what the club would be advocating for.
Anyway, I still think the Wikipedia is a great place to go find references about a subject you're not familiar with. But you absolutely need to do due diligence and continue finding references if your search is important.
And to be clear... my point is... sometimes human editors imply "facts" are in references when they clearly are not. In this case it was a minor, unimportant detail -- the location of the first meeting. But I have noticed several times wikipedia editors including "facts" that aren't supported by the citations. Caveat Lector.
Nition|3 years ago
But one day I went to the wiki page for client-side prediction and it said Duke Nukem 3D was first which I thought was curious, so I checked the reference on it and it was a recent interview with Ken Silverman - creator of the Build engine that DN3D ran on - which clearly stated DN3D was first:
> "People may point out that Quake’s networking code was better due to its drop-in networking support, [but] it did not support client side prediction in the beginning,” he explains. “That’s something I had come up with first and implemented in the January 1996 release of Duke 3D shareware."
Pretty unfair for Ken, I thought, that everyone’s got the wrong idea that it’s QuakeWorld. Since the source is available, with the help of Hacker News we even found the code for it in game.c[0].
To be a good citizen I went back over to the Wikipedia page and added a link to the source code to help solidify the claim. But while I was there I went back and read the interview again, and noticed a part I’d skimmed the first time:
> "It kind of pisses me off that the Wikipedia page article on ‘client side prediction’ gives credit to Quakeworld due to a lack of credible citations about Duke 3D."
I wondered if and when it had been changed from saying Duke 3D to QuakeWorld in the past (before eventually being changed back again sometime after the interview), so I went and had a look through the page history. It had been changed a few years ago due to lack of any citations. And the person who had removed it... was me.
---
[0] https://github.com/videogamepreservation/dukenukem3d/blob/ef... See domovethings(), fakedomovethings(), and fakedomovethingscorrect().
Arjuna|3 years ago
Alan MacMasters https://archive.ph/IL2ay
mellosouls|3 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_MacMasters
Ptchd|3 years ago
paulkrush|3 years ago
mypastself|3 years ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
yummypaint|3 years ago
kmacdough|3 years ago
Probably for the best given the sheer volume of examples & since the meta-lesson is more relevant.
vanderZwan|3 years ago
EDIT: Wikipedia (... yeah I know) says tie wraps were invented somewhere between 1956 and 1958. So the picture cannot be the earliest picture of the earliest toaster either I guess?
Goodness, I do not envy historians.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_tie
milesskorpen|3 years ago
nerdponx|3 years ago
bombcar|3 years ago
If a hoax or fake item doesn’t get caught quickly it becomes self perpetuating.
veddox|3 years ago
Tagbert|3 years ago
krunck|3 years ago
paleotrope|3 years ago
RugnirViking|3 years ago
> "Alan MacMasters, 30, is an aerospace engineer from London "and not the inventor of the toaster", he assures me with a giggle. "You shouldn't just believe everything you read on the internet."
> I feel nervous about the possibility of falling prey to another prank. So I ask Alan to send me a photo of his passport, which he does. He is not lying: even if he lacks the voluminous quiff of his namesake, he really is Alan MacMasters
jt2190|3 years ago
> On 6 February 2012, Alan was at a university lecture, when the class was warned against using Wikipedia as a source. To hammer the point home, the lecturer said that a friend of his - one "Maddy Kennedy" - had named himself on the site as the inventor of the toaster.
europeanguy|3 years ago