ericbarbour wrote:This one has it all: paid, crap, bad referencing, etc.
Yet something I found worth looking at.
From a friend:
18 hours ago a YouTuber named Quinton released a video revealing comics featuring Garfield more than a year before his accepted "first appearance" date. (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSPidZP_3X8). (Interestingly, the new date is January 8, 1976, the day after I was born.) You can literally watch Wikipedians editing the Garfield article as they incorporate this new information. I doubt they tried to independently verify it with the source newspaper before doing the edits.
So I watched it. Yes, first reaction, similar to Eric. But then I saw something much deeper, perhaps.
I wonder how Jim Davis will react, if at all, to having these pre-syndication comics brought back to public awareness. Apparently he never mentioned them in any interviews.
My comments:
This "Quinton" guy is a great example of the slow-spreading evil of YT as a "platform". Not only is it annoying to be lectured about the paragon of stupid comic strips by a hairy incel; that hairy incel has 321,000 YouTube subscribers....and most of his uploads are unwatchable shit. Someone out there takes him "seriously". And now he's being used as a "reliable source" on Wikipedia. Inevitable.
this was not "unwatchable shit." Basically, Quinton is highly self-expressed. He has a very narrow field he has explored, one might say obsessively. But he's witty and has self-awareness. He's found something very unusual, and he's excited about it. I know what that's like, to notice something that nobody else has seen, sometimes one might be unique on the planet.
Nobody is forced to watch his videos. Except maybe some Wikipediots, but only if they choose to. Is this guy reliable source?
Well, maybe. In a proper project, a source like him might be cited with attribution and caution. He's claiming to have seen scans of the actual cartoons. He shows images. How is that different from some anonymous Wikipedian claiming to have seen a source in a newspaper archive. That is, in fact, reliable source by policy, unless challenged, and sometimes the challengers lie.
Quinton is a real person, apparently, not anonymous. I'd say his testimony has weight, where it is clearly based on personal experience and he might even be considered an expert on the topic.
An actual scholar would certainly take him seriously.
(Many of the numerous WP articles about Garfield were created or heavily edited by IP addresses from the area of Muncie, Indiana. That's where Jim Davis lives. It is quite possible that Davis himself has been editing his own WP content or getting someone he knows to do it. A routine occurrence and a major violation of the "ROOLZ". I would expect this, since Davis is a notorious narcissist and thrower of tantrums. Muncie still sucks.)
OMG. Rule violation! Wikipedians and others VIOLATE RULES!
Who the fuck cares? If there were a reliable structure, rule violations would trigger attention, that's all. So what if Davis has edited his article, violating COI policy? It's a wiki, it can be fixed. But by whom? Who is responsible?
And the generic answer to that question is that
nobody is responsible. And that's the fatal flaw underneath so many Wikipedia issues.