The Islamic Golden Age Was Faked By Wikipedia: WTF!?

Join us today on Based Camp as we wallow in the crisis of reality laid bare by yet another means by which people propagate fake historical claims: Inserting plausible claims “backed” by often-hard-to-check-but-proper-seeming citations into Wikipedia entries long enough for journalists, scholars, and museum curators to pick them up and essentially thread them in to the blockchain of reality.

We examine how a single Wikipedia editor known as Jagged_85 inserted thousands of fabricated claims about Islamic inventions into the historical record (those edits spread into books, museum sites, and scholarly work through lazy sourcing and circular citations).

We also cover the spider-swallowing urban legend, multiple other documented Wikipedia hoaxes, and the mechanics that allow plausible-sounding falsehoods to become accepted facts. Ultimately, we all need to more carefully examine why certain narratives persist and what this particular Wikipedia vandalism tactic reveals about verifying information online.

Show Notes

Spiders

“The average person swallows 8 spiders a year”

I heard on a podcast that

“in a 1993 PC Professional article, columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of “facts” that were circulating via e-mail and how readily they were accepted as truthful by gullible recipients. To demonstrate her point, Holst offered her own made-up list of equally ridiculous “facts,” among which was the statistic cited above about the average person’s swallowing eight spiders per year, which she took from a collection of common misbeliefs printed in a 1954 book on insect folklore. In a delicious irony, Holst’s propagation of this false “fact” has spurred it into becoming one of the most widely-circulated bits of misinformation to be found on the Internet.”

Turns out they had lifted this fact from the Snopes page about the spider statistic

HOWEVER, IT ALSO IS TOTALLY MADE UP. Click on the text from the Snopes page and they say:

“tHis is a Big troLl

Checking your sources is an essential part of the fact-checking process. It’s a good thing you’re checking this one specifically.