It is funny looking back to the earliest articles and how little rules and regulations there were for making them. Including just how loose the reliable source rules were, since there was little oversight on using, say, someone’s blog as a source of information.
Back in the early days, I noticed my town had a wikipedia entry, but no demonym (word for people who live there; e.g. New Yorker, San Franciscan). I thought of a slightly rude word whose first half happened to be my town’s name (think if, say, Parisians were called “Parisites”), and added it as the demonym, totally unsourced, as a joke to show my buddy. It stayed. For a few years it stayed, never questioned. Then, the new Mayor used it in a speech; presumably, she’d looked it up on wikipedia. That speech was published in the local paper. The local paper was added to the page as a source, and not by me. A high-school gag between friends was now a sourced and cited fact.
It is funny looking back to the earliest articles and how little rules and regulations there were for making them. Including just how loose the reliable source rules were, since there was little oversight on using, say, someone’s blog as a source of information.
Back in the early days, I noticed my town had a wikipedia entry, but no demonym (word for people who live there; e.g. New Yorker, San Franciscan). I thought of a slightly rude word whose first half happened to be my town’s name (think if, say, Parisians were called “Parisites”), and added it as the demonym, totally unsourced, as a joke to show my buddy. It stayed. For a few years it stayed, never questioned. Then, the new Mayor used it in a speech; presumably, she’d looked it up on wikipedia. That speech was published in the local paper. The local paper was added to the page as a source, and not by me. A high-school gag between friends was now a sourced and cited fact.
So basically this XKCD comics happened in real life https://xkcd.com/978/
You really make me wanna go hunt it down.