The Islamic Golden Age Was Faked By Wikipedia: WTF!? — 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. While the 1954 book “Insect Fact and Folklore” is real, if you checked page 24 you would find that it says nothing about the “people swallow eight spiders per year” rumor, which likely originated decades after its publication. After failing to find any relevant material in the cited book, you may be led by your curiosity to discover that “PC Professional” and columnist Lisa Birgit Holst do not exist. The latter’s name, which many readers have successfully discovered, is an anagram of the phrase ‘This is a big troll.’ While some wish to credit us with the origins of this rumor, this urban legend pre-dated our own debunking. For example, the twelfth entry of a 1999 listicle titled “50 Top Pieces of Trivia“ states the “... average human eats eight spiders in their lifetime after they crawl into their mouths in their sleep.” This “easter egg” was created over 20 years ago in April of 2001 as wink to our long-time readers who were familiar with trolling we engaged in during the early days of the internet. We’re still on the hunt for the origins of this long-standing rumor. Let us know what the earliest instance of it is as you recall. Also, read more about False Authority and check out The Repository of Lost Legends.”
This is a great example of some harmless “fact” spreading, but what about more insidious behavior?
Jaggad_85
Check out Cremieux’s original post, The Invention of Islamic Invention.
The opening:
“Growing up, it was a common trope that cultures that we now associate with poverty, violence, and oppression were once world-leading in promoting prosperity and moral progress as well as the quintessentially human act of inventing. This popular belief was ultimately not driven by an earnest desire to promote awareness of empirically true but neglected facts. Instead, it was supported by anecdotes and quotations of dubious reliability and relevance, by scholarship that has turned out to be exaggerated or fraudulent, and by the promotion of these things in popular media.
My favorite example of this has to do with the invention of many of the inventions credited to the so-called Islamic Golden Age by a rogue Wikipedia editor.
Have you ever heard the name “Jagged_85”? If you’re a history buff, you’ve probably at least heard of some of his claims. For example:
- Muslims invented funnels and sieves
- Al-Razi invented dissolving substances and sublimation
- Jabir ibn Hayyan invented cheese glue
- Ibn Sahl first described the parabolic mirror
- An Islamic water clock from the 12th century had the earliest copper pipes
- Avicenna formulated momentum as weight times velocity
- The Brethren of Purity proposed a heliocentric universe in the 10th century
- Darwin drew on Ibn Miskawayh’s work to develop the theory of evolution
- Al-Ghazali directly influenced Descartes’ later philosophical work
There are many other claims I could add to this list: Taqi al-Din invented the telescope sometime in the 1570s; Avicenna discovered microorganisms; Muhammad ibn Musa discovered gravity between planets; Al-Biruni discovered elliptical planetary orbits; Al-Jazari invented flow regulators and feedback control; Raqqa had a major glass factory where 300 different glass recipes were used, or—most amazingly—Al-Battani discovered relativity a millennium before Einstein.”
This is Another Angle of Vandalism
Also see the manipulation of “Reliable Sources” on Wikipedia as chronicled by Trace Woodgrains: Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record.
Many Such Cases
Wikipedia keeps a list of citogenesis cases—false or joke edits that left the site, were repeated by outside writers, and sometimes cited back. Some examples similar to Jaggad_85:
- Alan MacMasters and the electric toaster.
- In February 2012 University of Surrey students edited the toaster article to credit a fictional 1893 Edinburgh inventor named Alan MacMasters, complete with a manipulated photograph.
- The claim lasted about a decade. It entered more than a dozen books in several languages, The Scotsman, The Mirror, a BBC cooking segment (a chef made a dessert in his honor), the Scottish government’s Brand Scotland site, a primary-school day, and a public nomination for the £50 note.
- A teenager noticed the photo looked edited in 2022; the biography was deleted that year.
- “Brazilian aardvark.”
- In 2008 a student added “Brazilian aardvark” as a nickname for the coati.
- The phrase spread to hundreds of sites, The Independent, the Daily Mail, and at least one University of Chicago Press book.
- Editors later re-added it because outside sources now “confirmed” it.
- The false name stuck long enough that some writers treated it as ordinary usage.
- Jar’Edo Wens.
- A 2007 joke edit created an Australian Aboriginal deity of “physical might” and “earthly knowledge” (the name is a play on “Jared Owens”).
- It stayed up nearly ten years and was mentioned in books, including Theresa Bane’s Encyclopedia of Demons in World Religions and Cultures (McFarland, 2012), before being exposed in 2015.
- The Washington Post covered the debunking.
- Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer pipes.
- A 2007 edit inserted a false anecdote about the diameter of London’s sewage pipes.
- It was repeated by The Spectator, The Hindu, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Museum of London (in modified form), and books on creative thinking, then cited back on Wikipedia into the early 2020s.
- Catherine Hettinger and the fidget spinner.
- Wikipedia attributed the fidget spinner to Hettinger on the basis of an unrelated 1993 patent.
- In 2017 The Guardian and The New York Times repeated the claim.
- The error remained on the article for years afterward.
- Other circular cases.
- A one-day 2007 edit crediting “Sir Malcolm Thornhill” with the first cardboard box reached at least two books and was later cited from one of them.
- A false claim that Sacha Baron Cohen had worked at Goldman Sachs was picked up by news outlets and then used as a source.
- After Maurice Jarre’s death in 2009, fabricated quotes were inserted and copied into obituaries, which were then cited.
- A 2016 edit saying Mike Pompeo served in the Gulf War was repeated in news coverage and by Senator Marco Rubio before the CIA contradicted it in 2018.
- An unsourced origin story for the Playboy Bunny name spread into books and newspapers.
There are also some elaborate hoax articles, less clearly “believed outside.”
- The Bicholim Conflict article (2007–2013) described a 1640–41 war between Portuguese Goa and the Maratha Empire that never happened, with footnotes to nonexistent books.
- It was marked a Good Article and nominated for Featured Article before an editor checked the sources. Searches for the conflict mostly led back to the article itself, so it is a stronger example of internal failure than of outside republication.
The formula for doing this is pretty consistent:
- Make a false but plausible claim
- Include citation (even if it doesn’t support it)
- Hope it sits around long enough for a journalist, textbook writer, or museum website to copy it
- Wait for other Wikipedia editors to then treat that claim as something that is independently confirmed
Discussion
What should this mean for our standards of evidence?
My standard of evidence used to be “is in a peer-reviewed journal” but now I question that.
Now we have to default back to a weird, weighted mix of things and see truth in terms of odds and not certainties, based on whether something is
- Personally empirically provable
- Multiply attested (extra points for chronologically/ideologically/etc. Different sources)
- Not flattering to whoever shared the information
- Plausible given other likely-true data