Might be wrong, but both the Twilight series and 50 Shades of Gray series were initially fan fiction pieces by housewives who published their work on blogs.
Alternate historical fiction is a very popular genre.
Listeners heard a dance band playing languid Spanish numbers in the "Park-Astoria Hotel". The music was interrupted suddenly by a flash. It was announced that a professor in a university observatory in the Southwest had noticed a series of gas explosions on the planet Mars.
They may have covered themselves legally, but it’s highly likely they intended to fool people
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/war-worlds-broadca...
I think you are missing the nuance that radio was a young medium and the radio program was unrealistic and introduced as fiction, so it wouldn't have occurred to anyone what effect it would have on the audience.
The people who were panicking for the most part heard the part about it being a radio production of war of the world' but their brain didn't process those words. Nobody could have expected that.
The audience would have also been less media savvy than they would be today, so would react more naively than the producers might have expected to an early experimental example of a "found footage" program.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi...
There's more or less a competition for them.
Some people really love to write. She must have gotten incredibly lost in her fictional world. I can only imagine it must have been the case here, and at some point it just happened to be that the medium she used was Wikipedia becuase that's where it all started for unrelated reasons.
I don't think Wikipedia is as closely vetted as we assume. For one, it's just so much cheaper to create content than it is to verify it. It's pretty amazing that Wikipedia is generally as high quality as it is with this in mind. And one reason why is that I imagine these types of bad actors (vandals making convincing edits just to be a jerk) are relatively rare.
I reckon most of Wikipedia's bad edits come from low-effort vandals and people trying to game high-value articles that have lots of eyeballs.
I keep finding gross errors in random pages that I visit for other reasons. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_toast
All of this article's references to French toast being described in the Roman Empire are straight-up lies. Interestingly, this is already noted on the talk page, but that has had no effect on the text of the article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Shimei_and_Qin_Xianglian
In the "History" section of this article, we see that the characters appeared in a book in 1595, and that they are based on a real-life official (and his wife) of the Qing dynasty, which began in 1644.
This was translated by Joesph Dommers Vehling, whose translation can be found here (recipe 296): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29728/29728-h/29728-h.htm
Vehling added "[and beaten eggs]", and equates the recipe with French toast, but makes it clear his addition is precisely that: it's bracketed and in lower case.
But an alternative for the wikipedia article I guess would be to just clarify that there was a dish of bread soaked in milk that has been compared to french toast, but that it didn't actually have eggs so it's debatable whether it really counts.
I should note that there are indeed multiple references to the Roman Empire on the page; take a look at the sidebar.
This is the text in question from the History section:
> The earliest known reference to French toast is in the Apicius, a collection of Latin recipes dating to the 1st century CE, where it is described as simply aliter dulcia 'another sweet dish'.[8] The recipe says to "Break [slice] fine white bread, crust removed, into rather large pieces which soak in milk [and beaten eggs] fry in oil, cover with honey and serve".[9]
There are two sentences, and both of them are lies. There is no reference to French toast in the Apicius, and the quote given in the second sentence -- as you've already noted -- doesn't come from the Apicius. Wikipedia is supporting the claim that a 1st-century work refers to French toast by citing material originally written in the 20th century.
The idea that French toast appears in the Apicius is something the wikipedia author just made up, yes.
So there is no mention of the eggs, but the thing does have some resemblance to French toast.
No, this sentence is self-contradictory. That would be like saying enchiladas date back to the Roman empire because they often combined bread with cheese.
The other issue is the war cry "you are a sock puppet!" Many seem to use this to try to force their opinion to be heard. I saw this first hand once and it can get ugly.
I dunno, I tried a while back to see how it all works and made some edits on a few articles that I figured were pretty backwater. I wasn't defacing, I was trying to correct with valid info and attempting to follow the editing guidelines. It all just got quickly reverted by what I assume were bots, calling it 'vandalism'. I moved on.
"The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic."
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/wikipedia-bicholim-conflict...
Or the Amelia Bedelia hoax?
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/amelia-bedelia-wikipedia-ho...
More here:
https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
Admin noticeboard thread:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis...
I find that in practice, the scary part is that it is not so impressive and that the thousand eyes are largely a lie.
All too often have I seen such things go on for a long time without anyone noticing, or perhaps many noticing, but not being motivated to investigate and call out, or perhaps many even calling out, but their calls going unanswered.
If you work in a commercial publisher, there's less oversight.
Do you? When you say you see such things going on without anybody noticing, presumably you noticed?
[0] I don't generally edit articles on politically-sensitive topics. They are wargrounds, patrolled by tough gatekeepers. I take any information in WP about current affairs with a bushel of salt. But it's still better than, for example, mainstream media.
Consider the situation with XScreenLock in Debian when it was found that the code had a timer in it that bugged people to update when using an unsupported version. Once the timer reached this point and many received this update, Debian immediately patched it to remove it as many found it annoying and it was a controversial move, but to me the most interesting part was that it was in the code, publically; it was added at one point,and no one at Debian knew.
This timer that merely annoyed users into updating could just as easily been serious malware that no one would have noticed that lay dormant to awaken at a set date.
As a not-so-far-fetched example, remember that QAnon started out as a similar sort of 'blended reality fiction' (before it was likely overtaken by state-level propaganda agents). The only difference is that QAnon was based on giving a new interpretation to reputable third-party texts, while this goes one step further to actually fabricate seemingly original texts by a reputable source - I'd argue that's even worse.
That's eg why financial newspapers often stick closer to the truth: their readers want to be able to play the markets, so need something with a bit of a reality check, instead of just playing to their ideological preferences only.
Are you sure?
From my limited experience, there is a huge amount of fictitious narrative in financial news. I just had a look at https://www.barrons.com/ - hard to say how much is just opinions of the journalist, but not much looked fact based.
If a journalist made a random prediction, and market participants believed the prediction, so the market then did what the journalist predicted, how would you know?
If they consistently randomly get lucky, that's fine. Just check multiple stories to get a sense of the distribution.
> If a journalist made a random prediction, and market participants believed the prediction, so the market then did what the journalist predicted, how would you know?
If all you care about whether the prediction is accurate (so you can trade on it), you don't need to worry about the philosophical differences between an accurate prediction and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
History in an ideal world tries to record what happened.
But realistically, history is a tool for politics.
But judging by the heavy downvotes of your comment, that fact doesn’t seem to be popular.
No its because he question to concept of truth itself. Literally everybody knows history writing is manipulated for many reasons.
But in my observation, however in my view historiography is often far more complex then reflecting simply political desires.
To answer the question "is there any other kind" would be enough to provide one [just one] example of a truthful history book (it is ok if it is imprecise in details as long as it is accurate overall--think physics theories within their application domain--we are far far away from history resembling hard sciences).
The example would demonstrate falsehoods you believe in.
Goofy as his methods are, Herodotus is a very compelling read specifically because it's not one coherent narrative, but a collection of points-of-view (none of which may be entirely correct, but reflect what people claimed at least).