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.
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.
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).
It was a minor point and I wasn't going to dig deeper but it does show how at least (possibly) simplified/incomplete narratives drive out more complicated histories.
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.
Hold on, when is it you think that newspapers did _not_ do this?
In general, if a paper is writing about anything vaguely contentious, it will use unnamed sources; if it names its sources then its sources won't stay sources for long, and the media will become little more than a system for regurgitating press releases. It is always worked this way; this isn't new.
(There was a fun bit in "Yes Minister" where the minister, while leaking something, was offended that the journalist wanted to use "sources" instead of "sources close to the Prime Minister" to attribute his leak...)
Giving indications about the source is important for the reader to evaluate its seriousness. Not giving too much information is important to keep your source long term, and to get others (nobody is going to talk to a journalist know to expose their sources). Of course this depends on journalists being reasonably truthful otherwise the whole thing has no value. This is why reputation is critical and serious journals sack their journalists when they find out they lied.
What is the alternative? It is also very easy to make up a quote, attributing it to someone who’s never said anything like it or just make up a name.
(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.)
> "These [claims] would get picked up in different types of media, I would cite them, and they would become fact," Alex says.
Now think, how many time have you heard that fact when reading retrospectives on Game Boy, or watching Youtube videos?
What possible motivation could exist for establishing a online reference using the media as the canonical and sole source of truth?
Because "the media" is... the best source we have?
To be clear, Wikipedia doesn't require that you cite mainstream media sources only. You can cite anything that's a primary source as fact (whether that be a work of investigative journalism, a book, a letter, a blog post by someone involved, a study described in a journal paper, etc); and anything that's a secondary source as an attributed quote (whether that be a work of editorial journalism, a magazine article, a blog post by someone who isn't involved, a meta-analysis described in a journal paper, etc.)
That's actually a very low bar. For example, people who are discouraged from "original research" on Wikipedia, can simply stick said original research onto a website they own, and then edit Wikipedia to cite that, and that's 100% allowed. (It's disincentivized to promote your own investigative reporting or quote your own words on Wikipedia, but if you did it all "by the book", nobody's going to revert the edit.)
In all cases, the only real requirement is that everything Wikipedia says has to be be attributable via citation to something, somewhere, that exists in the public sphere of semi-permanent accessibility, such that a reader could reasonably be expected to be able to fact-check the citation qua citation by "chasing the pointer" to its referent. So you can't cite a person (as a person won't necessarily give you the same answer twice); but you can cite an interview with said person recorded at a specific time and put into some form of public record (e.g. a court proceeding.)
> "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
> 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.
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.
I was not questioning the legitimacy of the toaster itself. Just thought it would be ironic if they think this is an "original" picture of the earliest toaster because it's grainy and black and white, but didn't realize this particular photo could not have been taken earlier than in the late fifties due to the tie wrap.
If a hoax or fake item doesn’t get caught quickly it becomes self perpetuating.
The problem is that the desire to fix this is entirely partisan and the party in power always mocks the other party, even if this was their issue for the last cycle.
The USA has a problem. The process (of voting) isn't just supposed to provide an answer, but an answer you can trust. There's no transparency in the process and if people ever do ask a question ("why was that seemingly extra bag of ballots pulled out of a closet at 1am?") they get mocked as idiots who don't intimately understand the process.
Looking at the process of voting and counting in the USA there are a lot of things I'd fix to make the process more visible. In any industry where people monitor workers by video (casinos especially) they have them work in very standard ways, hand motions, card locations, etc, all chosen to make cheating hard and easy to detect.
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.
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().
Alan MacMasters https://archive.ph/IL2ay
Probably for the best given the sheer volume of examples & since the meta-lesson is more relevant.
