Interesting you should mention biology, as there are few things on the planet Earth I know less about than that. But I'm sure most of us could, with a modest amount of effort, compose a plausible article in our own subject specialties that would pass a cursory new pages patrol check.
The JFK assassination is one of my specialties, and I do my best to make the many, many, many WP articles on that topic a little more sane. If the Seigenthaler article had shown up in Category:JFK assassination or even been linked to [[JFK assassination]], I most likely would have spotted it and saved us a lot of grief. And yes, I try to RC patrol as much as possible, but I can only be on WP about 18 hours a day. ;)
But I honesty don't believe that you need any specialized knowledge of US history or the JFK assassination to spot a whopper like the one in the Seigenthaler article. This isn't an article carefully crafted by an expert to slip under the radar, it's a prank that a UPS guy tossed off on his coffee break. Are we really so easily fooled? All that we need to spot things like that is a critical, skeptical eye.
Stan Shebs shebs at apple.com wrote:
Heh, I guarantee you that I could create a ichthyological whopper, pun intended, with pictures and citations from some of the rarer books in my personal library, and it will slip right by you, plus everyone else who doesn't happen to have those books to check. I bet I could even get it into the day's DYK!
But if you don't know enough to evaluate, say, the plausibility of an article about the popular home aquarium fish Melanocetus, I'm not going to take that as evidence you should not be editing the encyclopedia; it just means that no one person can know enough to be able to make accurate quick judgments on each new article. We need better teamwork, not just individual prowess.
Come to think of it, why didn't *you* personally catch the bogus Seigenthaler article? Seems like it should be right in one of your areas of special knowledge, right? And don't you RC patrol?
Stan
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