G'day Rob,
Interesting you should mention biology, as there are
few things on the planet Earth I know less about than
that. But I'm sure most of us could, with a modest
amount of effort, compose a plausible article in our
own subject specialties that would pass a cursory new
pages patrol check.
Golly, there's times --- usually after a couple of hours of RC patrol,
when the morale is wearing *really* thin --- when *any*
properly-wikified article gets the metaphorical New Page Stamp of
Approval(TM), simply because of the sheer relief of coming across an
edit that isn't utterly awful in every possible way.
<snip />
But I honesty don't believe that you need any
specialized knowledge of US history or the JFK
assassination to spot a whopper like the one in the
Seigenthaler article. This isn't an article carefully
crafted by an expert to slip under the radar, it's a
prank that a UPS guy tossed off on his coffee break.
Are we really so easily fooled? All that we need to
spot things like that is a critical, skeptical eye.
One might say that it's an American thing. But we've heard Americans
say they wouldn't notice it, too. Seigenthaler isn't JFK, he's not Lee
Harvey Oswald, he's not Jack Ruby. The vast majority of Americans have
never heard of Seigenthaler even now (and certainly hadn't heard of him
before the controversy); what hope has some random RC/cleanup patroller,
who could be of any age, or from any country?
I pride myself on my knowledge of American history (it beats your
knowledge of Australia, guaranteed), but there's no way in hell I'd have
found anything suspect in him being implicated in the JFK assassination.
Thousands of alternative theories have been proposed, and how should
a university student from Australia know if the name of some obscure
American was or was not included amongst those theories? How about
someone from Canada, the UK, Romania, France, New Zealand, South Africa,
Brasil, Russia ... ? How --- *why* --- should we know?
If I were to say to you that George R. Viscome was for a time considered
a suspect in the murder of Salman ibn Hamad al-Khalifa, but that no
credible charges were laid and Mr Viscome's name was cleared, what would
you say? Would you say "that's nonsense, Salman ibn Hamad al-Khalifa
wasn't assassinated!"? Or "that's nonsense, Viscome has never been
suspected of any criminal activity in his life!"? Could you say either
without doing research? If you need to perform research before you know
you need to perform research, it's safe to say an error isn't obvious
enough for an RC patroller or article-cleaner-upper to notice.
Cheers,
--
Mark Gallagher
"What? I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse
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