[WikiEN-l] Astroturfing -- fabricating your own sources

Fri Dec 8 22:46:57 UTC 2006

> From: Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com>

> For example, I doubt you'd find many
> objections to using a company's own information page, when looking  
> for the
> date a company was founded; for more complex or potentially  
> controversial
> information, however, getting information from third party, neutral  
> sources
> is probably preferred.

Just being argumentative here... on the whole you're right but even  
in such simple matters some degree of skepticism is advisable. When  
the source is the company's own website, it's not a bad idea to use  
qualified phrasing like "XYZ gives its founding year as so-and-so"  
rather than "XYZ was founded in so-and-so."

A good example is the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, which  
claims "Established 1895" and claims to be "The oldest  movie company  
in America:" http://www.biographcompany.com/about_us_home.html . Our  
article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 
American_Mutoscope_and_Biograph_Company , gives a more complete view  
of what turns out to be a "complex and potentially controversial" story.

_University_ founding dates are tricky, because they are or were  
traditionally an important point of prestige and govern the order of  
march in academic processions. The University of Bologna gets to  
march ahead of Oxford, for example. Therefore, universities are  
strongly motivated to make a case for the earliest possible date,  
however tenuous. An egregious example of this is the University of  
Pennsylvania, which tries to have it both ways. Penn rather likes the  
founding narrative that gives it a nonsectarian origin, closely  
associated with Benjamin Franklin and his "Proposals for the  
Education of Youth in Pensilvania." Unfortunately, that leads a  
founding date of 1749, making it three years younger than Princeton.  
So, in 1899, Penn officially adopted a position that identifies its  
origins, rather tenuously, with a firebrand proto-Methodist George  
Whitefield. To prove the truth of this narrative, they added a statue  
of Whitefield on campus to accompany the various statues of Franklin.  
This enabled them to claim a founding date of 1740, beating Princeton.

William and Mary was founded in 1693, closed in 1882, then re-opened  
in 1888. Did that break the chain or not? Is the institution that  
opened in 1888 really "the same" one that closed?

Corporate spinmeisters are quite fond of concocting warm and fuzzy  
"origins" tales, and other stories that confirm the company's  
preferred view of disputes involving lawsuits, patents, priorities,  
and the like. Parker Brothers (Hasbro)'s website tells the story  
(http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly/default.cfm?page=history) of how  
Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania invented the game in  
1934. From their website, one would never guess that anything  
"complex or potentially controversial" about the matter. Fortunately,  
our article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_%28game%29 , does  
not rely solely on Hasbro as its source.

Trust, but verify.