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Alan MacMasters: How the great toaster hoax was exposed
- Arjuna 4y agoFor those interested, this is an archive of the contrived Wikipedia article: Alan MacMasters https://archive.ph/IL2ay https://archive.ph/IL2ay
- mellosouls 4y agoAnd the current link, which redirects to a "Reliability of Wikipedia" article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_MacMasters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_MacMasters
- paleotrope 4y agoWhat's strange is the real hoaxer is never identified beyond his fist name.
- europeanguy 4y agoGood. Let's not idolize vandals.
- Nihilartikel 4y agoVandal maybe, but another perspective would be that they are playing the role of an Epistemological Chaos Monkey, providing fitness tests to the worldwide bullshit filter.
- Joker_vD 4y agoWhat about that one editor of Scots Wikipedia?
- sebzim4500 4y agoThat guy didn't really do any damage though, IIRC he basically wrote the entire Scots wikipedia himself so its not like he made anything worse.
- teddyh 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Do_not_disrupt_Wikipedia_to_illustrate_a_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Do_not_disrupt_Wikip...
- RugnirViking 4y agoThey are though? They have the name Alan MacMasters, same as the fake inventor > "Alan MacMasters, 30, is an aerospace engineer from London "and not the inventor of the toaster", he assures me with a giggle. "You shouldn't just believe everything you read on the internet." > I feel nervous about the possibility of falling prey to another prank. So I ask Alan to send me a photo of his passport, which he does. He is not lying: even if he lacks the voluminous quiff of his namesake, he really is Alan MacMasters
- bombcar 4y agoThe "hoaxer" was Alan's friend Alex.
- xbmcuser 4y agoNo Alex just changed the name it was Alan that embellished and perpetuated for it years after that
- tedunangst 4y agoWhich article did you read? > Alex felt mischievous, and wondered how far his prank could go. He asked himself what would happen if he created a Wikipedia article entirely devoted to the supposed inventor of the toaster. > To illustrate it, Alex grabbed a photo of himself and edited it to look like an image from the 1800s - this was the very same photo that, years later, would catch Adam's eye.
- stavros 4y agoHis full name is Alex Jackson, it says so on Wikipedia.
- monkpit 4y agoConfusingly, the people in this story are named Adam, Alan, and Alex. Alex did the first actual edit.
- 4y ago
- jt2190 4y agoI think the above comment is referring to the true identity of “Maddy Kennedy”: > On 6 February 2012, Alan was at a university lecture, when the class was warned against using Wikipedia as a source. To hammer the point home, the lecturer said that a friend of his - one "Maddy Kennedy" - had named himself on the site as the inventor of the toaster.
- Ptchd 4y ago"These [claims] would get picked up in different types of media, I would cite them, and they would become fact," Alex says.
- bombcar 4y agohttps://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/ If a hoax or fake item doesn’t get caught quickly it becomes self perpetuating.
- Tagbert 4y ago<ref href=“whitehouse.org”>election fraud</ref>
- LawTalkingGuy 4y agoAs a foreigner, I'll just note that I haven't seen a US election without ballot/machine issues, or the widespread fear of issues, in at least 20 years - every time the losers have talked about structural election issues like ballot harvesting. The problem is that the desire to fix this is entirely partisan and the party in power always mocks the other party, even if this was their issue for the last cycle. The USA has a problem. The process (of voting) isn't just supposed to provide an answer, but an answer you can trust. There's no transparency in the process and if people ever do ask a question ("why was that seemingly extra bag of ballots pulled out of a closet at 1am?") they get mocked as idiots who don't intimately understand the process. Looking at the process of voting and counting in the USA there are a lot of things I'd fix to make the process more visible. In any industry where people monitor workers by video (casinos especially) they have them work in very standard ways, hand motions, card locations, etc, all chosen to make cheating hard and easy to detect.
- veddox 4y agoI always found that xkcd rather amusing, I never thought it really happened!
- mellosouls 4y agoOne of the weaker points of Wikipedia is the way editors lazily refer to journalistic "reliable" sources as authoritative when a significant amount of the time the journalist is lazily using WP as their own source. Just a couple of these circular references build up a circumstantial base of "evidence" which is then itself used to bolster the original weak claims which often reflect nothing more than an editorial or journalistic assumption or bias.
- setr 4y agoI think ultimately the problem is that Wikipedia assumes journalists should be treated by default with a degree of respect above “professional gossip monkeys”.
- porthz 4y agoNot only WP: An increasing amount of articles just cite "sources say" or "an unnamed U.S. intelligence official says". Then the entire world press copies the article within hours. Even Reuters and AP have adopted the practice. Then Wikipedia cites the narrative as the truth.
- rsynnott 4y ago> An increasing amount of articles just cite "sources say" or "an unnamed U.S. intelligence official says" Hold on, when is it you think that newspapers did _not_ do this? In general, if a paper is writing about anything vaguely contentious, it will use unnamed sources; if it names its sources then its sources won't stay sources for long, and the media will become little more than a system for regurgitating press releases. It is always worked this way; this isn't new. (There was a fun bit in "Yes Minister" where the minister, while leaking something, was offended that the journalist wanted to use "sources" instead of "sources close to the Prime Minister" to attribute his leak...)
- netrus 4y agoIt's a shame that stuff like that is (at least in my experience) not taught in school. Years of lurking on Twitter have taught me about background-talks, "sources close to XYZ", how leaks, PR releases, and whistleblowing work [0] - and it really adds to correctly judging the stories you read. Of course, it requires quite a bit of trust in the media you consume. [0] and submarines, of course ;)
- yummypaint 4y agoGiven the broad (though admittedly shallow) impact this had in Scotland, and how long it was perpetuated, perhaps the hoax itself deserves an article? The people who learned false stuff about him aren't going to unlearn it because the article was deleted. There needs to be something to set the record straight.
- kmacdough 4y agoIt is! Although not with it's own article. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Notable_incidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Not... Probably for the best given the sheer volume of examples & since the meta-lesson is more relevant.
- vanderZwan 4y agoIs that a tie wrap around the power cord of that 1909 toaster pictured at the end of the article? How old are those? EDIT: Wikipedia (... yeah I know) says tie wraps were invented somewhere between 1956 and 1958. So the picture cannot be the earliest picture of the earliest toaster either I guess? Goodness, I do not envy historians. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_tie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_tie
- nerdponx 4y agoThe hoax plot thickens! It seems like it's a later photo of a replica of the original (or just the guts of a random toaster) that's meant to look like it's from 1909. The 2-prong plug also looks surprisingly modern.
- milesskorpen 4y agoIt could be a picture of the earliest toaster, but the tie was added at a later date. No claim it's original packaging! I imagine it's from a museum or collection and you don't want the cord dangling around.
- vanderZwan 4y agoYeah, something like that must have happened. I was not questioning the legitimacy of the toaster itself. Just thought it would be ironic if they think this is an "original" picture of the earliest toaster because it's grainy and black and white, but didn't realize this particular photo could not have been taken earlier than in the late fifties due to the tie wrap.
- paulkrush 4y ago32 comments so far and no one is questioning if this story is fake.
- mypastself 4y agoHey, it must be true, there’s a Wikipedia article claiming it happened: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- meadhbh-hamrick 4y agoMy favorite Wikipedia story is when I tried to update the page for the "Homebrew Mobile Phone Club" to reflect the location of the first meeting. Someone (probably not at all maliciously) commented that the club's first meeting was at the Tech Shop in Menlo Park. This was untrue. It was at the Google offices at the GooglePlex in Mountain View near Moffett Field. I know because I was the organizer of the first meeting. As proof that the first meeting was at the Tech Shop one of the editors cited a Wired article where the author mentioned they attended a meeting there in Menlo Park. We absolutely held meetings there and I am forever grateful to Jim Newton for sponsoring us. Nowhere in the article (I believe by Robert Strohmeyer) did it mention this was the first meeting. And actually... I'm re-reading it... it talks about meeting at a law firm in Palo Alto, which I think was where we had our second and third meetings, so the conversation about the Tech Shop meetings being the first meeting is even weirder. Anyway... no amount of discussion could convince the volunteer wikipedia editor that our first meeting was at the GooglePlex, even the post on Boing Boing announcing it (thank you Cory Doctorow for amplifying the message.) They just decided they were right and I was wrong. In the end they nominated the article for deletion and by that time I was totally okay with it. The club had dissolved after the release of Android and the iPhone, where you could actually write your own phone apps. And now with the Pine Phone (and other platforms I can't remember the name of) it's not clear what the club would be advocating for. Anyway, I still think the Wikipedia is a great place to go find references about a subject you're not familiar with. But you absolutely need to do due diligence and continue finding references if your search is important. And to be clear... my point is... sometimes human editors imply "facts" are in references when they clearly are not. In this case it was a minor, unimportant detail -- the location of the first meeting. But I have noticed several times wikipedia editors including "facts" that aren't supported by the citations. Caveat Lector.
- Nition 4y agoA while ago most people thought QuakeWorld was the first game to do client-side prediction. Carmack has a .plan from 1996 talking about it so there's a clear reference. But one day I went to the wiki page for client-side prediction and it said Duke Nukem 3D was first which I thought was curious, so I checked the reference on it and it was a recent interview with Ken Silverman - creator of the Build engine that DN3D ran on - which clearly stated DN3D was first: > "People may point out that Quake’s networking code was better due to its drop-in networking support, [but] it did not support client side prediction in the beginning,” he explains. “That’s something I had come up with first and implemented in the January 1996 release of Duke 3D shareware." Pretty unfair for Ken, I thought, that everyone’s got the wrong idea that it’s QuakeWorld. Since the source is available, with the help of Hacker News we even found the code for it in game.c[0]. To be a good citizen I went back over to the Wikipedia page and added a link to the source code to help solidify the claim. But while I was there I went back and read the interview again, and noticed a part I’d skimmed the first time: > "It kind of pisses me off that the Wikipedia page article on ‘client side prediction’ gives credit to Quakeworld due to a lack of credible citations about Duke 3D." I wondered if and when it had been changed from saying Duke 3D to QuakeWorld in the past (before eventually being changed back again sometime after the interview), so I went and had a look through the page history. It had been changed a few years ago due to lack of any citations. And the person who had removed it... was me. --- [0] https://github.com/videogamepreservation/dukenukem3d/blob/ef609159bd352985a0c63734a11241d86c873fe5/SRC/GAME.C https://github.com/videogamepreservation/dukenukem3d/blob/ef... See domovethings(), fakedomovethings(), and fakedomovethingscorrect().
- krunck 4y agoIt's not just Wikipedia. People still believe that Saddam Hussein had mobile chemical/biological weapons labs. And that helped justify a war. So in perspective, I'm OK with people being ignorant of the inventor of the toaster for a while.