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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G'day Rob,
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.
Golly, there's times --- usually after a couple of hours of RC patrol, when the morale is wearing *really* thin --- when *any* properly-wikified article gets the metaphorical New Page Stamp of Approval(TM), simply because of the sheer relief of coming across an edit that isn't utterly awful in every possible way.
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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.
One might say that it's an American thing. But we've heard Americans say they wouldn't notice it, too. Seigenthaler isn't JFK, he's not Lee Harvey Oswald, he's not Jack Ruby. The vast majority of Americans have never heard of Seigenthaler even now (and certainly hadn't heard of him before the controversy); what hope has some random RC/cleanup patroller, who could be of any age, or from any country?
I pride myself on my knowledge of American history (it beats your knowledge of Australia, guaranteed), but there's no way in hell I'd have found anything suspect in him being implicated in the JFK assassination. Thousands of alternative theories have been proposed, and how should a university student from Australia know if the name of some obscure American was or was not included amongst those theories? How about someone from Canada, the UK, Romania, France, New Zealand, South Africa, Brasil, Russia ... ? How --- *why* --- should we know?
If I were to say to you that George R. Viscome was for a time considered a suspect in the murder of Salman ibn Hamad al-Khalifa, but that no credible charges were laid and Mr Viscome's name was cleared, what would you say? Would you say "that's nonsense, Salman ibn Hamad al-Khalifa wasn't assassinated!"? Or "that's nonsense, Viscome has never been suspected of any criminal activity in his life!"? Could you say either without doing research? If you need to perform research before you know you need to perform research, it's safe to say an error isn't obvious enough for an RC patroller or article-cleaner-upper to notice.
Cheers,
Mark Gallagher wrote:
I pride myself on my knowledge of American history (it beats your knowledge of Australia, guaranteed), but there's no way in hell I'd have found anything suspect in him being implicated in the JFK assassination. Thousands of alternative theories have been proposed, and how should a university student from Australia know if the name of some obscure American was or was not included amongst those theories? How about someone from Canada, the UK, Romania, France, New Zealand, South Africa, Brasil, Russia ... ? How --- *why* --- should we know?
We Canadians do manage better the rest of you lot on that score. I just love it when a Canadian contestant on "Jeopardy" runs a US history category, and leaves the citizens in the dust. 8-)
Ec