Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed
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Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed
#2What's strange is the real hoaxer is never identified beyond his fist name.
Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed
#3What's strange is the real hoaxer is never identified beyond his fist name.
Good. Let's not idolize vandals.
Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed
#4"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
#5https://xkcd.com/978/
If a hoax or fake item doesn’t get caught quickly it becomes self perpetuating.
Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed
#6Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed
#7Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed
#8One 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.
Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed
#9One 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…
Not only WP: An increasing amount of articles just cite "sources say" or "an unnamed U.S. intelligence official says".
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.
Re: Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed
#10One 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. 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).