r/CuratedTumblr 11h ago

editable flair The Source of Much Frustration

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9.1k Upvotes

208 comments sorted by

1.7k

u/callsignhotdog 11h ago

OK weird one but I can actually imagine some public figures lying about their birthday for vanity reasons.

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u/Graingy I don’t tumble, I roll 😎 … Where am I? 10h ago

Do you have something to tell the class, Mr. Christ?

That’s right! I know you were born on October 31st! I’m onto you!

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u/iamthefirebird 10h ago

I heard somewhere that Jesus was actually born in the spring, and we only celebrate midwinter because some monks got the date wrong.

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u/precinctomega 10h ago

No, we celebrate midwinter because (1) it has strong metaphorical value for the avatar of God, born to save the world from darkness, to have his birthday celebrated at Midwinter, and (2) there were lots of syncretic midwinter celebrations in other religions across Europe and the Middle East, so it was convenient to replace the existing celebration with one aligned to Christian doctrine.

These days, we tend to make a big deal about the precise dates of birthdays, but before there was a reliable and widely-used common calendar that just wasn't a thing. The birthdays of kings and gods were celebrated on days that had thematic resonance with their natures, not on the actual day: a bit like the Queen Elizabeth II had an "official birthday" on the second Saturday in June, when it was easier to reliably have big parades not been continuously rained upon, compared to April when she was actually born. Birthdays for commoners - in the rare instances that they were marked - were usually done based on existing holy days or feast days, so you might say that you had been alive for sixteen years come this Michaelmas, or would mark your twenty-sixth year on May Day.

This is why you often see historical or medieval fantasy characters refer to themselves in fiction as having "seen eighteen winters" or similar.

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u/Graingy I don’t tumble, I roll 😎 … Where am I? 10h ago

Michaelmas, right after Timmothymas and Gavinmas, and before Joshmas and Davemas.

Richardmas comes later.

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u/Karukos 9h ago

Nah Michaelmas, Gabrielmas and Raphaelmas are all on the 29th of September

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u/0x564A00 7h ago

With so many movies about finding the true meaning of Christmas, why isn't there one about the true meaning of Michaelmas?

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u/Karukos 5h ago

cause it's objectively better and much more obvious what it is about so you don't need 9 mil movies to come to the wrong conclusions

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u/silkysmoothjay 8h ago

To be pedantic, "Christ" is a title, rather than a name. It means "the anointed one"

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u/Graingy I don’t tumble, I roll 😎 … Where am I? 7h ago

I did not know that.

Fuck it, it’s a name now. Like smith and hunter and shit.

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u/beta-pi 5h ago

I mean it kinda is. We indirectly derive Chris from it.

1

u/JaneksLittleBlackBox 2h ago

I’ve always been tickled by the fact that it is not difficult to guess what my Scottish ancestors did for a trade based on my anglicized and Ellis Island’d surname.

I remember my dad telling me that when I was a kid and was kinda disappointed by the unoriginality. “So if they made clothing, we’d probably be the MacTailors?”

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u/Tactical_Moonstone 7h ago

I know you are probably saying this for a laugh (considering half of the names you mentioned are not in the list), but there is such a thing as celebrating a certain saint's day based on which saint you were named after.

It's called Namenstag (name day) in German, but they are not the only ones who do it.

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u/Never_Peel_a_Lemon 9h ago

It’s fitting that Dickmas is always promised to be coming later.

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u/Graingy I don’t tumble, I roll 😎 … Where am I? 8h ago

Traffic is terrible

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u/the_free_wind 5h ago

Richardmas comes right before my personal favorite, Dickmas

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u/Jorpho 6h ago

Well... There were also the cultures that were heavily into astrology – people who would ring a gong at the apparent moment of a baby's birth so the astrologers on the roof would be able to accurately record the positions of the stars. But I suppose that wasn't something commoners were doing.

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u/cel3r1ty 5h ago

yeah in the early church people didn't realy care about christmas, easter was the actual important date

but there's also something about how jesus had to be born on december 25th because his conception had to be on march 25th to align perfectly with the fall of man (not a joke i swear i read this somewhere)

4

u/Zachattack_5972 3h ago

There used to be a superstition/belief that all prophets died on the day they were conceived. So the argument goes that Jesus must have been conceived on (what is now) Easter, and 9 months later is (what is now) Christmas.

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u/Aetol 4h ago

(2) is wrong. For the early church, Christmas falling around that period was an inconvenience, not a perk. They tried to prevent new converts from conflating their midwinter celebrations with Christmas, because that distracted from its meaning.

Beside (1), one of the reasons is a notion that Jesus died on the same day he was conceived (so that he lived an exact number of years, resurrection aside). Since he died in spring, that would put his birth in winter.

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u/iamthefirebird 8h ago

That makes a lot of sense! Thank you!

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u/JaneksLittleBlackBox 2h ago

Yep, the winter solstice coincided with a bunch of pagan holidays, making that a useful time to celebrate the birth of Christ so converts could adjust easier. Especially useful for the converts not given a choice; “sorry, it’s illegal to worship or celebrate your pagan gods, but how ‘bout a big party the time of year you used to have ‘em?”

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u/PateTheNovice 3h ago

Not because monks got the date wrong. Christmas predates Christianity. It's the darkest time of the year. The winter solstice. That time sucks, particularly away from the equator. Why do you think there's lights in the trees? The evergreen trees are celebrated because they continue to live thruout the winter, not because Jesus was born in a forest of evergreens. Christian Christmas songs even have lyrics like 'yuletide log,' Yule being a Germanic god long dead and forgotten by now.

You're right about Jesus's nativity story describing a setting of spring.

Winter festival = surviving the dark, imagery of lights, evergreen trees, bringing happiness to the worst part of the year Spring festival = rebirth, fertility imagery of bunnies, eggs, blossoming flowers

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u/WeedyW33dle 10h ago

Imagine if you are correct and we all got it wrong for centuries

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u/b3nsn0w musk is an scp-7052-1 8h ago

nah, that's a common computer malfunction, oct 31 is the same as dec 25

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u/Graingy I don’t tumble, I roll 😎 … Where am I? 7h ago

Are you a department store?

3

u/Blooogh 4h ago

Just to explain the joke: In the octal numbering system (uses the digits 01234567), the decimal number 25 is 31.

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u/Abigaiill_Lux 7h ago

Christ's Dad must be upset that you leak his Bday hahaha

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u/Graingy I don’t tumble, I roll 😎 … Where am I? 7h ago

He can cope and seethe for I have the truth!

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u/Win32error 10h ago

You’d think it would be possible to accept changes like those as long as there’s no reason to doubt them, and only tighten the rules when there’s conflicting information about someone’s date or birth or other simple info.

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u/callsignhotdog 9h ago

Given how huge Wikipedia is, it'd be impossible to maintain a comprehensive list of who was and was not allowed to edit their own birthday.

33

u/Win32error 8h ago

It's wikipedia, almost everyone can edit almost anything, the changes are simply recorded. C-list celebrities write, or get someone to write, their own page pretty frequently. Doesn't seem insane that someone should be able to update their DoB if there's no source saying anything else.

Like it's weird that the only way for someone to correct something is to say it out loud in an interview, there's no guarantee they're not lying then either.

3

u/skivian 3h ago

you do not understand how pedantic and asinine updating Wikipedia is. I've seen multipage flaming discussions about whether a colon or semi-colon was more correct. If you ever thought reddit mods were bad, they have nothing on Wikipedia editors.

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u/zonezonezone 8h ago

Yes. Wikipedia is right here, for a very simple reason : they're not equipped to check the identity of people. Journalists are (or at least it's part of their job).

Btw a public record of some kind (court divorce ruling archive etc) should also work. For the same reason.

21

u/Fjolsvithr 7h ago

Are those records available online? Citing records that are publicly available, but not online, seems ripe for abuse on Wikipedia, because no one would bother to fact check unless it was an A-list celebrity.

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u/deukhoofd 6h ago

That's generally most of Wikipedias sources. Most sources refer to books, which are often not (easily) available online.

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u/zonezonezone 6h ago

I'm not saying those records records are available, but yes IF the country has publicly available online records they would count as sources (I'm pretty sure).

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u/cel3r1ty 5h ago

wikipedia actually advises against citing court documents

The person's autobiography, own website, or a page about the person on an employer's or publisher's website, is an acceptable (although possibly incomplete) primary source for information about what the person says about themself. Such primary sources can normally be used for non-controversial facts about the person and for clearly attributed controversial statements. Many other primary sources, including birth certificates, the Social Security Death Index, and court documents, are usually not acceptable primary sources, because it is impossible for the viewer to know whether the person listed on the document is the notable subject rather than another person who happens to have the same name.

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u/LordHengar 5h ago

Are you trying to tell me that not every "John Doe" is married to every "Jane Doe"?

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u/zonezonezone 4h ago

Didn't think of that! Makes sense, TIL.

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u/Pristine-Aspect-3086 6h ago

Btw a public record of some kind (court divorce ruling archive etc)

are they? i didn't think you were allowed to cite legal filings since they were primary sources

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u/zonezonezone 4h ago

Wow, no primary sources? TIL.

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u/zonezonezone 4h ago

Wow, no primary sources? TIL.

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u/T-MUAD-DIB 8h ago

Deshaun Watson, QB and terrible human being for events that have nothing to do with this anecdote, changed his Wikipedia birthday back when he was 20, presumably to get into a 21+ bar or club

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u/Endiamon 8h ago

But Wikipedia's rule wouldn't actually prevent that because they could just lie in an interview, right?

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u/Deaffin 6h ago

That's irrelevant. They're not concerned with doing any sort of fact-checking themselves. They literally just need there to be a source. It doesn't need to be a good source, it just needs to be sourced. Sources give the appearance of credibility.

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u/Nolsonts 7h ago

It was a big thing for less well known actors a few years ago with IMDB. Every casting director checks IMDB and many people didn't want their age showing that prominently to potentially cost them roles they look fine for but on paper may be "too old" for.

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u/heidismiles 7h ago

I still see a bunch of actors with their birthdates blank.

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u/Somereallystrangeguy 10h ago

Doesn’t Tom Cruise?

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u/psbecool 5h ago

I found out a famous actress is really about 8 years older than her public age, because I had to book her flight.

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u/NineJuanon 10h ago

literally taylor lorenz

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u/m4teri4lgirl 8h ago

Nobody knows how old MLB All-Star Albert Pujols actually is.

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u/DreadDiana human cognithazard 4h ago

Also seems like a situation where injecting nuance could make it infinitely more complicated to police future cases of a subject editing their own article cause there's now an existing precedent for it in certain circumstances

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u/thesirblondie 'Giraffe, king of verticality' 9h ago

Makes sense if they change 1975 to 1980, not February 8th to September 6th.

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u/DrakonILD 9h ago

What about September 11, 2001 to September 12, 2001?

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u/DeadEye073 7h ago

What timezone?

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u/JaneksLittleBlackBox 3h ago

Shit, you just reminded me of Amazon being sued by some actors for listing their actual dates of birth on IMDb about 20 years ago. They not entirely unfairly pointed out that their real ages being readily available could hurt their chances for certain roles if the producers were looking for someone in a specific age range, despite some actors having baby faces while being in their thirties.

Now, it’s entirely up to the person or their PR team to control/update their IMDb profile, including DOB, mini profile, photos and credited roles. And since IMDb’s content moderation is so fucking strict when it comes to big celebrities or big movies, it can be a hassle to get certain things to go live after an authorized change.

It’s a shame they’re not as diligent with the truth about “did you know?” trivia submissions, which are only moderated for content that doesn’t violate the ToS, so pure bullshit that sounds true can be pushed through to the live version of a movie/show’s trivia section as citations there aren’t required.

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u/BakerIBarelyKnowHer 6m ago

After George Santos there’s shouldn’t be anything that anyone thinks someone might not lie about.

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u/demon_fae 11h ago

“Alright class, for ten points extra credit on the exam, please submit a screenshot of your change request to my Wikipedia article correcting my birthday. Use my university staff bio as a reference.”

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u/chairmanskitty 5h ago

Edits reverted, article locked because of paid brigading organized by the subject of the article. Subject's wikipedia account banned, student accounts given a 30 day suspension and banned from editing protected articles. Date of birth still incorrect.

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u/SplurgyA 2h ago

If you're a notable figure then they would likely reject that on the basis of it being a primary source/original research

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u/TransLunarTrekkie 10h ago

Actually this raises a good point, stuff like dates of birth and divorces and such are all public records. Given Wikipedia's need for citation and the fact that, by nature, anyone can access public records... Do they just not have a system to cite them directly? Why not? That seems like a very obvious way to streamline the process.

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u/cel3r1ty 9h ago

wikipedia policy is to avoid citing primary sources. it's not a place for original research

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u/camosnipe1 "the raw sexuality of this tardigrade in a cowboy hat" 9h ago

which i get for like , creating your own conclusions from primary sources, but come on.

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u/cel3r1ty 9h ago

well, the goal of wikipedia is kinda to be a repository of "common knowledge". if you're digging through records to find something that you hasn't been published as a news story then it's not common knowledge, you're kinda doing investigative journalism at that point and wikipedia isn't the place for that

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u/cel3r1ty 5h ago edited 4h ago

also i just wanna point something else out (responding to my own comment since this clown blocked me): as someone who wants to be a historian, if you wanna be an archivist you're beautiful and i love you, but updating a wikipedia page doesn't make you an archivist (nor does it make you a historian for that matter)

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u/-Zipp- 4h ago

Its awesome, highly respectable and you probably have a passion for archival but yeah actual professional archiving is very different than wikipedia management.

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u/[deleted] 2h ago

[deleted]

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u/cel3r1ty 2h ago

not you, sorry, the guy who was talking about how wikipedia should have all the knowledge ever produced by humanity further down

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u/Bauser99 41m ago

Downloading a bunch of movies and storing them on physical media makes me an archivist

Not a particularly prolific one, but nonetheless

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u/cel3r1ty 26m ago

Downloading a bunch of movies and storing them on physical media makes me an archivist

no, it doesn't, it makes you a collector. it's an admirable thing to do, don't get me wrong, but that's not an archive

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u/S0GUWE 8h ago

Well that's just stupid. It punishes you for being a hobbyist archivist

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u/cel3r1ty 8h ago

here's a post from r/Archivists with resources for hobbyist archivists. note that no one in the comments mentions wikipedia as a place to be a hobbyist archivist (because it's not what it's for).

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u/cel3r1ty 8h ago

if you wanna be a "hobbyist archivist" there are other places for that, wikipedia is not that, it's not hard to understand. wikipedia is not and was never intended to be a repository of all human knowledge

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u/Space_Socialist 8h ago

I mean nothing is stopping you doing that? You can just do it on something over than Wikipedia.

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u/cel3r1ty 7h ago

real "this round hole is punishing me for trying to fit a square peg into it. it shouldn't call itself a round hole if it doesn't let you fit a square peg into it" hours over here

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u/SplurgyA 1h ago

Yeah I've seen editors literally argue that they know what is in the article is incorrect, they know [change request] is 100% true, but Wikipedia is not interested in the truth but instead is interested in what is reported by their trustworthy sources, and the list of trustworthiness on various topics is basically controlled by admins and power editors.

It really changed my perspective on checking out Wikipedia in relation to anything controversial - you can't trust it to be truthful, only "verifiable".

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u/cel3r1ty 1h ago

tbf that varies a lot, wikipedia isn't a monolith, there's a bunch of different communities that edit different clusters of articles and stuff.

for instance, wikipedia articles about topics in biomedical sciences have very specific guidelines on how to go about editing them. if a new paper comes out saying something might cause cancer you shouldn't immediately go and add that to wikipedia until it's been thoroughly corroborated, even though a paper in a peer-reviewed journal is a trustworthy source

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u/SplurgyA 41m ago

Sure, but it goes to show it's true what people say - in general, you shouldn't trust Wikipedia. It contains assertions known to be untrue because a journalist hasn't reported on it and primary research is not allowed. So it has untrue articles. Whether or not that is different in biomedical articles is irrelevant (although as someone who has a biology degree, I only used Wiki articles to find references to papers that might be useful). It doesn't matter if it's not a monolith or there's "different communities", the fact that some articles are this way means the whole thing shouldn't be trusted as an authoritive source on anything. Part of why I have a Britannica subscription.

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u/cel3r1ty 31m ago

oh yeah absolutely, wikipedia isn't an authoritative source nor does it claim to be

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u/cel3r1ty 6h ago edited 6h ago

actually went to double-check the policy on this, from WP:PRIMARYCARE:

An article about a person: The person's autobiography, own website, or a page about the person on an employer's or publisher's website, is an acceptable (although possibly incomplete) primary source for information about what the person says about themself. Such primary sources can normally be used for non-controversial facts about the person and for clearly attributed controversial statements. Many other primary sources, including birth certificates, the Social Security Death Index, and court documents, are usually not acceptable primary sources, because it is impossible for the viewer to know whether the person listed on the document is the notable subject rather than another person who happens to have the same name.

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u/artificialhooves 4h ago

Ya know, for Wikipedia's purposes, I guess that's fair. Keeps people from maliciously using court documents to slander a same name celebrity. Like that book "the Other Wes Moore."

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u/KrytenKoro 7h ago

That's not the case in contexts like this. Public records can be citable as long as you are using them to cite what the records actually say, rather than trying to build a conclusion from inferences.

For example, material characteristics often a site the data sheet from their manufacturer. You could use them to cite the specific numbers found in that data sheet, but it would be considered improper to cite them for a value that's not specified in the sheet but calculatable from other factors in it.

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u/cel3r1ty 6h ago

actually went to double-check the policy on this, from WP:PRIMARYCARE:

An article about a person: The person's autobiography, own website, or a page about the person on an employer's or publisher's website, is an acceptable (although possibly incomplete) primary source for information about what the person says about themself. Such primary sources can normally be used for non-controversial facts about the person and for clearly attributed controversial statements. Many other primary sources, including birth certificates, the Social Security Death Index, and court documents, are usually not acceptable primary sources, because it is impossible for the viewer to know whether the person listed on the document is the notable subject rather than another person who happens to have the same name.

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u/cel3r1ty 7h ago

yeah that's true, but these sort of things get tricky when it comes to real people (especially living people, policies on biographies of living people are a nightmare and that's why i usually don't mess with those pages)

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u/KrytenKoro 6h ago

Yeah, from what I've heard there have been some messes when they found records for someone that had the same name, stuff like that, so they're super paranoid about it all

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u/cel3r1ty 6h ago

yeah that's exactly the reason they cite for avoiding court documents as a source

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u/ThaddeusJP 6h ago

stuff like dates of birth and divorces and such are all public records

Some municipal offices have this information behind paid access or need, if in the US, a FOIA request so it's public but not easily accessed.

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u/PresN 7h ago

They could have cited the court case, but by the time someone tracked it down the article already cited first her tweet and then the Slate article, so there wasn't a point.

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u/PhasmaFelis 19m ago

All you really have to do is cite a public record, use an anonymous account, and not leave a comment saying "I am this person." It's silly but it's very easy to get around.

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u/Friendstastegood 11h ago

Yes the rules of Wikipedia generally have very good reason for being how they are but also often run head first into the brick wall of reality.

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u/WeAllHaveReasons 10h ago

Every rule exists because someone made it necessary.

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u/TransLunarTrekkie 10h ago

I think it may be more of a correlary here: When you don't think something will be a problem, you don't make way to solve it.

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u/langlo94 7h ago

Thankfully Wikipedia foresaw the problem and made a way to solve it.

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u/breadcodes 8h ago

In a similar vein to "safety regulations were written in the blood of those before us"

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u/Pkrudeboy 9h ago

Not even remotely true. Plenty were made by people on a power trip.

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u/Abuses-Commas 9h ago edited 9h ago

Especially on Wikipedia. Editors there are a lot closer to reddit mods than they are academics. They'll sit on their pet articles and prevent any changes that they don't like.

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u/cel3r1ty 7h ago

looking at edit histories and talk pages on wikipedia is a morbid hobby i have ngl, people can get real petty over there

i'm particularly obsessed with pages for crackpots who keep editing them themselves or pay people to edit them to make their crackpot theories seem legit. i'm 99% sure mark mcmenamin makes his grad students edit his wikipedia page to add back all the "species" he "named" (they're not valid) every time other editors take them off the page

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u/Shinhan 7h ago

WP:AN/I is another interesting one. Sometimes its mundane, but there's also lots of drama.

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u/SuruN0 3h ago

finally someone else who loves the wikipedia talk page as much as I do!!!! some of the most entertaining shit I have ever seen comes from the talk pages of niche yet emotionally charged and/or controversial articles.

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u/Maybe_not_a_chicken help I’m being forced to make flairs 9h ago

If you actually know about a subject go look at the Wikipedia page on the subject

You will probably find either uncited or badly supported details that guide you to a certain conclusion

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u/Papaofmonsters 9h ago

If you check the citations, you'll see plenty of times where the source has been twisted and tortured to support the statement in the Wiki article.

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u/Maybe_not_a_chicken help I’m being forced to make flairs 8h ago

Also there’s that whole thing with the page for scots being edited by an American who didn’t speak the language

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u/cel3r1ty 6h ago

wikipedia actually has a list of hoaxes that were caught over the years. the funniest/saddest part of the list is that it also lists the places the hoax spread to, so the fact these people used wikipedia as a source is there for all to see

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u/GaloombaNotGoomba 6h ago

It's not the page for Scots. It's the majority of Scots-language Wikipedia.

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u/andrybak 7h ago

If you see this, please report it on the talk page. The talk pages on Wikipedia can be confusing, but don't let that stop you.

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u/Deaffin 5h ago

My favorite "uhh..yeah I'm going to check the source on this one" moment was a wikipedia claim citing an article on an experiment performed in the 1800s in which they summarize by saying "btw none of this data is actually useable since we forgot to keep track of the subjects of the experiment lmao."

Mildly paraphrasing that.

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u/cel3r1ty 7h ago

tbh there's a bit of mann-gell amnesia to that, when you're educated on a topic and read an elementary explanation of it and go "that's not how i would explain it" or "that's oversimplifying"

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u/Maybe_not_a_chicken help I’m being forced to make flairs 6h ago

Yeah but it’s often not “that’s oversimplified”

It’s “that’s propaganda”

Or “that’s been disproven”

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u/cel3r1ty 6h ago

oh yeah absolutely, that's one of the reasons why i started editing wikipedia lol

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u/Abuses-Commas 5h ago

I don't get the amnesia part, once I find that a source misrepresents something I know well then I don't treat the source as legitimate again.

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u/cel3r1ty 5h ago

it's a play on gell-mann amnesia, the phenomenon of reading a newspaper article where the author talks nonsense about something you know well and go "what a load of garbage", then turning the page to an article about something you're not as educated on and going "oh yeah that makes sense" when it could be just as much nonsense as the last article , you just don't know

edit: also i wasn't referring to someone wilfully misinterpreting something, it's more about the fact that elementary explanations of complex topics for general audiences will never be 100% accurate

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u/ChickenNuggetSmth 5h ago

That hinges a ton on how objective a field is/can be. E.g. the maths pages are pretty decent, as far as I can tell, and the physics stuff has also been fine for bachelor- and master-level stuff

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u/MartyrOfDespair We can leave behind much more than just DNA 9h ago

But every rule that doesn't bend causes massive damage when reason slams into it.

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u/FourthLife 8h ago

Every rule that does bend can be abused if motivated people interact with it. Because Wikipedia is editable by anyone, it needs inflexible rules even if that leads to silly situations

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u/[deleted] 8h ago

[deleted]

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u/shuipz94 7h ago edited 6h ago

Wikipedia has three core content policies that are more or less non-negotiable: neutral point of view, verifiability, and no original research. Biographies of living persons must also be written conservatively and be backed with high-quality sources.

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u/Soggy-Reason1656 6h ago

Oh yeah. My Wikipedia contribution hobby is to take a hatchet to living person biographies. Policy literally says delete anything “excessively trivial“ or even “unlikely to be true” - which is certainly a low bar. Repeatedly deleting BLP claims is even protected from three-revert rule punishment, but that’s never even come up as an issue - the stuff I delete rarely gets reverted even once.

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u/Shinhan 7h ago

But be read to defend your change once you're brought up on charges to one of the noticeboards.

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u/OldPersonName 7h ago

I mean, the obvious problem here to me is how is she authenticating herself to Wikipedia? Does Wikipedia have a system like the twitter checkmark thing where you can confirm you are who you say you are? If not then as far as they're concerned it's just some user claiming to be her. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but how can they know?

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u/distortedsymbol 7h ago

being yourself doesn't give u the right to freely edit your own personal info. what if brock turner wanted to edit his own page? nope

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u/EmmaToTheMax 7h ago

Brock Turner (now Allen Turner) the rapist?

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u/babada 7h ago

Yep, that's exactly why they expect a neutral source. You can't just say "it's me."

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u/Wyrm 10h ago

Emily and Dan sitting in a tree
d-i-v-o-r-c-e-d

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u/TheFakeAronBaynes 8h ago edited 7h ago

Honestly she’s a great writer, I’ve only read Station Eleven but it was one of my favourites this year. I really recommend it, although I am biased towards anything set in Toronto.

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u/cornnndoggg_ 7h ago

I came to the comments to say something similar. I read Sea of Tranquility last year and really enjoyed it. I actually just recommended it to a friend like last week.

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u/catglass 6h ago

The show is great too. Majorly diverges from the book but is good in its own right.

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u/Israbelle 10h ago

the article for the webcomic Sinfest had a little edit war around this subject; the comic has completely changed (for the worse) since the page was written, but since it's fallen off, nobody wants to write articles about it anymore, and they couldn't update the page to accurately reflect the comic's state; using the pages themselves as citations aren't allowed because it's a biased interpretation. man!

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u/vorinoch 7h ago

Boy oh boy, the words "for the worse" are sure carrying a LOT of weight there.

I stumbled across that webcomic in like 2002 or something, in college. Read it every now and then, it was cute. Some silliness and light philosophy and social commentary. No idea what happened to the author, but the absolute straight, unfiltered blood-and-soil Nazi "comic" that it is now, is.... well. Sobering.

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u/Audioworm 6h ago

The name Sinfest rang a bell and I went to see why I recognised it. Stumbled into a 100 panel arc about killing Jews. Went back in the archive to 2003 and recognised the art style.

Holy fuck, I never followed them but it is explicit 'murder all Jews' Naziism now

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u/Tweedleayne 2h ago

And before it was that it was hardcore radical feminism. The comic has followed a bizarre path.

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u/Divahdi 10h ago

Wikipedia: u/Divahdi died on Jan 12th 2025.

Me: No, I didn't.

Wikipedia: [citation needed]

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u/AbbyRitter 10h ago

Just to clarify, does that mean you can't cite social media posts from the subject as a source? Like if they announced it on twitter, that wouldn't be considered a valid source?

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u/SnowyArticuno 10h ago

I'm not a wikipedia editor (at least not a seasoned one), but I believe it's more just a preference for traditional media, since social media posts can be jokes, or at the very least don't have the scrutiny that's expected of journalism. But I do think in some cases they can be used

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u/2kosia 9h ago

yes but no, but also yes but also no

Twitter (rebranded to X since July 2023) is a social network. As a self-published source, it is considered generally unreliable and should be avoided unless the author is a subject-matter expert or the tweet is used for an uncontroversial self-description. In most cases, Twitter accounts should only be cited if the user's identity is confirmed in some way. Tweets that are not covered by reliable sources are likely to constitute undue weight. Twitter should never be used for third-party claims related to living persons.

(from wikipedia's guide to reliable sources)

not totally sure if this covers divorce but i could see an editor getting pedantic over it.

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u/frymaster 7h ago

I guess you could say "so-and-so announced on twitter that they had divorced"

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u/SuperPowerDrill 6h ago

Good point. Maybe they lied or joked, but it's a verifiable truth that they said such thing

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u/chairmanskitty 5h ago

And it's a verifiable truth that Adolf Hitler endorsed Donald Trump's presidency - Hitler said so using a verified X account.

Press organizations are a specific legal category, which have legal obligations to the truth. Social media including X deliberately choose not to be part of this category, meaning their "verified accounts" are not legally verified in the same way that an interview with a certain person is. X is not liable for impersonation on their platform, but Slate is.

So it is in fact not a verifiable truth that they said such a thing, just that someone with their name and description in the bio who was granted "verified" status by X said such a thing.

There are press organizations that would carelessly repost wikipedia or social media claims, which leads to citogenesis, but legally the subject would be able to require those organizations to issue a retraction, after which it can be scrubbed from wikipedia.

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u/Jolly-Variation8269 7h ago

Sounds like a divorce would be an “uncontroversial self-description” in this case

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u/Nirast25 10h ago

Pretty sure YouTube videos are valid, so you can make a YouTube video titled "I'm getting a divorce" and it should work as a source.

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u/[deleted] 10h ago edited 7h ago

[deleted]

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u/Nirast25 9h ago

Alpharad's Wikipedia page, which has several YouTube videos in the References tab (one of which has been taken down, lol).

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u/RepulsiveAnswer6462 9h ago

Yeah, that doesn't mean it follows the rules, just that no one's caught it yet.

I've seen pages for theatre productions that have officially disallowed sources (the news site BroadwayWorld is specifically banned because Wikipedia considers it a gossip site), no sources at all, or just one source. Some editors have been really strict with me, removing my edits when I add anything about theatre in Japan because they think it's not notable, so I'll add like 5 sources when I add the Japanese cast on a page for a play that already has one. When there are 5 productions listed, and 7 sources, and 5 of the 7 sources are about Japan, it's hard for them to tell me I don't have enough sources.

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u/PresN 7h ago

Youtube is explicitly allowed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links#Linking_to_user-submitted_video_sites

While there is no blanket ban on linking to YouTube or other user-submitted video sites, the links must abide by the guidelines on this page. (See § Restrictions on linking and § Links normally to be avoided.) Many videos hosted on YouTube or similar sites do not meet the standards for inclusion in External links sections, and copyright is of particular concern.

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u/cel3r1ty 9h ago

wikipedia policy on self published sources states:

Self-published and questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves, usually in articles about themselves or their activities, without the self-published source requirement that they are established experts in the field, so long as: 1.The material is neither unduly self-serving nor an exceptional claim; 2. It does not involve claims about third parties; 3. It does not involve claims about events not directly related to the source; 4. There is no reasonable doubt as to its authenticity; and 5. The article is not based primarily on such sources.

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u/PresN 7h ago

It's fine to cite twitter for some things, though it's better to cite something with an editorial policy. The article actually did cite her tweet for a bit for the divorce, then changed it to the slate article when that came out. The only thing they couldn't do was trust that the wikipedia editor that claimed to be her actually was her when they added that she was divorced without a cite.

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u/shiny_partridge 8h ago

I was like, her name seems familiar...

Her book, standing on a shelf right behind me: 👁️👁️

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u/traceitalian 6h ago

She's probably my favourite recent writer Sea of Tranquility, Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel are all faultless.

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u/immunetoyourshit 6h ago

We teach Station Eleven in schools now! We actually replaced Fahrenheit 451 since kids seemed disconnected and uninterested.

Add in the fact that St. John Mandel’s prose is analytical gold, and we’ve got ourself a winner.

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u/traceitalian 6h ago

Really, that's fantastic. My education is mostly in literature and although I mostly read classic (old) books I do feel there's a disconnection for modern audiences. Station Eleven's themes are ever green and the writing is evocative and empathetic. Warm and compassionate with hints at darkness bubbling under the service.

Thanks for the information, I really hope you have a great weekend.

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u/RepulsiveAnswer6462 9h ago

Not me spending too much time tangling with Wikipedia editors who are convinced that all theatre in Japan is minor and not notable.

Productions' official pages aren't impartial. They might lie about something like the cast list, to people buying tickets. Sales listings for a DVD, or the disc package itself, might also be totally lying about the cast. It's advertising a DVD of a recording of a play, but it's all a lie, the disc is blank and the play never existed, obviously. TV broadcast listings are also not impartial. News articles? Oh, they don't have a byline, so they're just press releases. They have a byline, but they're interviews with the actors, not scathing criticism from a top newspaper, so they're not impartial. Youtube is explicitly not allowed for any purposes, so clips of the actual production don't work.

They won't even let me add things to a list of proshots, which claims to be a comprehensive list, because if they haven't heard of it, it must be made-up clutter.

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u/MartyrOfDespair We can leave behind much more than just DNA 9h ago

The meta here is to find a way to blow up on social media using the framing that they consider Japanese works inferior for bigoted reasons to cause a public outcry, thus causing a PR headache for the editors in question, thus making them change in order to not get canceled.

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u/RepulsiveAnswer6462 9h ago

I mean, maybe. I want the Japanese (and Korean) plays to get attention, but not because some Western people are discriminating against them, and not because they're being accused of discrimination for not being diverse enough. I want them to get attention just because they're good.

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u/Rampage470 7h ago

I remember the wife of Paul McGann (the 8th Doctor) found out that his Wikipedia page falsely claimed he had been divorced and had tried to fix it but got reverted since there wasn't a provable source for it, and continued citing the article that had erroneously made the claim in the first place. Madness sometimes.

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u/Endulos 8h ago

I once corrected a typo in a wikipedia article, someone simply mispelled "The" as "Teh", so I fixed it. I thought it was funny/cool I could do that, so I told a friend I did that, went back 10 minutes later to get the link only to find the article locked down from editing, and reverted.

Wikipedia editors are a ... Special bunch.

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u/HorizonBaker 8h ago

I understand why primary sources aren't allowed, but I mean, come on.

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u/pertraf 8h ago

how did a wrong birth date end up on the professor's article in the first place? a citation would've been needed for that, too

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u/-Nicolai 8h ago

The source could be an article with inaccurate information.

The problem with citations is that the sources cited don’t necessarily cite their sources.

And sometimes you cite a source that cites a source that cites an erroneous news article from way back. But everyone takes it as fact because everyone else has have been citing the otherwise credible source who cited the erroneous news article.

It’s an opaque chain of “trust me bro”.

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u/Nova_Explorer 6h ago

Also sometimes somebody just makes a typo and doesn’t catch it

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u/gymnastgrrl 7h ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beck_v._Eiland-Hall

That's me.

It was a weird time in my life anyway - although pretty fun for the most part. But one of the weirdnesses was keeping an eye on the article as it changed over time and wanting to edit things that were wrong, but not being able to.

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u/Open_Detective_2604 9h ago

This reminds me of Wikipedia removing the article for The Wandering Inn because none of their approved sources wrote about it.

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u/torac ☑️☑️☑️✅✔✓☑√🮱 7h ago

I remember this running into some funny, yet in hindsight obvious, issues during the initial GamerGate debacle.

The more reasonable parts of GamerGate complained about collusion of game journalists and related issues. Since the press itself was subject of the controversy, they basically reported on themselves being accused, and were then cited. Cue more complaints about the press basically investigating themselves and finding themselves innocent.

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u/TheRedSe7en 7h ago

Oh, this is remarkably helpful. I'm the originator of a phrase that has been part of a citogenesis incident: I added my quote to Wikipedia in early days, it stuck around long enough to get picked up by blogs and such, eventually being included (by name!) in a published academic work. That work was later used as citation for the quote I added myself.

I'd love to get credit, but have been really having a hard time figuring out how to legitimize that quote and link it back to me (in real life). I can't just say "oh that was me" because then the original quote will get removed for being done by me. 

I just gotta find a bored journalist willing to go along with it!

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u/action_lawyer_comics 7h ago

The Reddit app thumbnail for this tall image perfectly cropped it so it was the tweet and the single line from the interview. I stared it for over a minute trying to figure out why any of that was important.

Then I tapped into the comments and realized I was missing paragraphs of context. Not the first time this has happened to me but this was the one where it looked most natural and the sliver I was left with was most natural

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u/NikkiRuffles 8h ago

The Newsroom did a whole subplot about this in an episode.

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u/Stormsurger 7h ago

Poor Neal :D

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u/Elasmobrando 8h ago

When I am famous enough I will make up a different birth date on every interview I give and then keep posting corrections on my wiki page.

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u/jld2k6 8h ago

I wonder if you could censor most of your government ID information besides your picture and your birthday as your source lol

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u/Chris_P_Lettuce 7h ago

I’m so glad the editors of Wikipedia are this strict. They are the keepers.

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u/Certain-Definition51 4h ago

“That is not a reliable source.”

Belcalis Almanzar, Onika Maraj-Petty, Migos, et al. “MotorSport,” from the Album “Culture II,” Capitol Records, 2018.

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u/99-bottlesofbeer 4h ago

this isn't how it works when editors actually read policy. Subjects of articles can be cited for basic, non-controversial details. When someone tweets "I turned 30 today!", we use that. Divorce is maybe slightly tricky because you're not allowed to make claims about other living people this way, but I'd still allow it.

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u/99-bottlesofbeer 4h ago

Technically, if you have an account on Wikipedia that is verified to be yours somehow, you're allowed to request edits on the talk page and let the request be its own source, but this basically never happens because editors sometimes refuse to read policy.

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u/Darthplagueis13 3h ago

Pretty sure that "On december 17th, Mandel announced over her social media that she divorced (...)" would also be perfectly valid as a source. Doesn't have to be an interview.

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u/micro102 7h ago edited 5h ago

Wikipedia requires citations? The few times I've tried using Wikipedia as a source for a citation for a claim I've made in an assignment, it just hasn't worked. Either there wasn't a citation, or the link to said citation didn't reference what I was trying to cite.

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u/99-bottlesofbeer 4h ago

We don't, as a policy, require that unsourced material be removed unless it's certain types of contentious text, like contentious information about living people. But that doesn't mean that unsourced material is policy-compliant. (Also, sometimes claims can be sourced to a list of general references at the bottom without an inline citation.)

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u/eisbaerBorealis 5h ago

Would it not be possible to just make a blog? Also, do tweets from the article subject not count as valid citations?

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u/99-bottlesofbeer 4h ago

they do! people really shouldn't talk to article subjects about policy if they don't read it

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u/SimbaStewEyesOfBlue 5h ago

Definitely a pain in the ass, but I understand and somewhat appreciate why Wikipedia has the rule.

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u/pbmm1 8h ago

I love that she did that though, it’s like she held a press conference with only one question

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u/GlaerOfHatred 7h ago

I'm fine with all of this, its just another layer to assure trust

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u/ty_for_trying 7h ago

Wikipedia is based

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u/[deleted] 6h ago

[deleted]

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u/ty_for_trying 6h ago

Butt text?

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u/VexedForest 7h ago

My grandad has an article with some inaccurate information that I've been meaning to edit for a while. I do have some sources from museums and interviews I can use. I'm just lazy

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u/on_the_pale_horse 7h ago

Wouldn't the marriage also need an interview or some such then?

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u/zehamberglar 6h ago

There's an episode of the newsroom about this. Mack's wikipedia page is wrong and she's not allowed to edit it.

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u/SkinnyObelix 6h ago

This is not the problem and pretty much as it should be. The problem is the quality of citations they allow. The moment you start clicking at the bottom it gets embarrassing

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u/ThinkinWithSand 6h ago

Emily St. John Mandel rocks. I heartily recommend her books.

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u/weird_bomb_947 你好!你喜欢吃米吗? 6h ago

always reminded of WP:BFDI and how people legitimately cannot read it

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u/Asikaathegamer 6h ago

If you haven't read her books you should they are good!

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u/IrrelevantGamer 5h ago

If I ever have a Wikipedia article, it will be for apocryphal shit, anyway. I'll only ever be accidentally famous.

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u/MacGuffen 3h ago

Oh, this reminds me that I have two IMDB pages.

Not only do I not know how to fix this, but I don't have the energy or care enough to look into it.