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Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed

#51

Post by meadhbh-hamrick »

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.

Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed

#52

Post by hinkley »

rsynnott wrote: post #10
mellosouls wrote: post #8

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 j…

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.…

To be fair, nobody has a better venomous sole impression than the mimic octopus.

Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed

#53

Post by Nition »

mellosouls wrote: post #8

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 j…

Especially when the hoaxer is adding those circular references themselves on purpose.

> "These [claims] would get picked up in different types of media, I would cite them, and they would become fact," Alex says.

Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed

#54

Post by jt2190 »

paleotrope wrote: post #2

What's strange is the real hoaxer is never identified beyond his fist name.

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.

Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed

#55

Post by sebzim4500 »

Joker_vD wrote: post #7
Nihilartikel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vandal maybe, but another perspective would be that they are playing the role of an Epistemological Chaos Monkey, providing fitness tests to the worldwide bullshit filter.

What about that one editor of Scots Wikipedia?

That guy didn't really do any damage though, IIRC he basically wrote the entire Scots wikipedia himself so its not like he made anything worse.

Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed

#56

Post by Nition »

meadhbh-hamrick wrote: post #51

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…

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.

---

[0] https://github.com/videogamepreservation/dukenukem3d/blob/ef... See domovethings(), fakedomovethings(), and fakedomovethingscorrect().

Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed

#57

Post by bombcar »

monkpit wrote: post #46
bombcar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "hoaxer" was Alan's friend Alex.

Confusingly, the people in this story are named Adam, Alan, and Alex. Alex did the first actual edit.

The temptation to correctly identify them as the founding members of what later was backronymed to the American Automobile Association (AAA) is rising ....

Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed

#58

Post by meadhbh-hamrick »

Nition wrote: post #56
meadhbh-hamrick wrote: post #51

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…

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 r…

OOF!

Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed

#59

Post by msrenee »

rsynnott wrote: post #45
TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For over a decade, wikipedia credited some guy with inventing a special type of blimp, based on some ill-researched news article. About a year ago the article was checked and removed, and then that guy actually invented a blimp, but now wikipedia is refusing to reinstate the article.

I mean, I think imaginary special blimps fit into the same space as non-existent fish; it's exactly the sort of thing that Wikipedia's defense mechanisms don't work for, largely due to lack of interest. (I do find the concept of a venomous sole fascinating, though. How would that work? Would it _bite_ people? They're seabed-dwelling flatfish!)

Could have venemous spines on the pectoral fins. If I were going to be a venemous flatfish, that's how I'd roll.

Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed

#60

Post by ispo »

derefr wrote: post #39
smaudet wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember learning about firsthand and secondary sources. Wikipedia is not a primary encyclopedia, its a secondary source. Just like journalism is full of individuals paid off or paid to say (or not) something (sometimes blantantly untrue), wikipedia has plenty of inaccurate or false information. So, it used to be I would use wikipedia as a type of third hand source - find information on a topic, then dig through it…

> Wikipedia is not a primary encyclopedia, its a secondary source. Technically, Wikipedia is a tertiary source. A "third hand source", as you say. A secondary source is something like e.g. a book written by a historian based on research they did translating and putting together some primary-source ancient writings. The secondary source can be considered semi-authoritative on a topic; but is still interpreted through…

This tertiary source concept you just invented it, it does not exist.
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