About ten years ago I saw an anonymous Wikipedia user who had edited dozens of articles about Mario, Sonic and Putt-Putt, rotating their names so that the articles about Mario were now about Sonic, the articles about Sonic were now about Putt-Putt, etc. I'm sure those changes were noticed and reverted almost immediately.
Looking deeper into this user's edit history, I found a series of edits to articles about films, changing their running times by adding or subtracting a few minutes. I have no idea whether these changes were ever noticed, but Wikipedia absolutely depends on the kind of person who'll obsessively go through their VHS collection and check each movie's Wikipedia sidebar against the info on the back of the box.
It's impossible to fact-check everything we read, and it's impossible to be aware of every kind of scam, so we rely on heuristics to guess whether to trust any given source. One of the heuristics I've found most useful is to consider what the author has to gain by lying, but sometimes I think about the guy randomly adjusting movie running times and I just have to lie down.
I have my own version of this, in a sense.
November, 2003. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga has just come out. I mean it's days old. Maybe even hours old. My friends and I are all congregated on IRC and talking about the game, and one of them laments that its too new for anyone to have properly done a soundtrack rip, because they want an MP3 of the battle theme.
I'm savvy enough that I know how to record the song from an emulator, but just calling it "Battle Theme" sounds so... dry. There's no official title, either. So, when I tagged the song, I just made one up:
- Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga - "Let's Go!" (Battle Theme)
I didn't think anything of it.
Well, this friend had connections to a lot of game music community type people. The folks who study game music, care about game music, and remix game music for places like OC Remix. And he must have spread my MP3 around, because I have constantly run across people claiming that the Superstar Saga battle theme is called "Let's Go!"
To be clear, there has never been an official soundtrack release for Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. At best, we've had a "Sound Selection" CD, which collects a handful of songs from all three games, but none of them are the battle theme from Superstar Saga.
So, for example, if you check VGmusic.com, all of the submitted MIDIs for the battle theme are titled "Let's Go!" If you search it on Youtube, you have people to this day treating it as the defacto official title for the song. As of this writing, this upload is only seven months old:
And it was me. I'm the one you can blame for this. The song has no official title and the one I gave it stuck, and it stuck hard.
(A different version of this post I made on tumblr years ago had me saying my made-up-title was "Here We Go!", but given all the MIDIs on VGmusic.com are titled "Let's Go!", I'm pretty sure that had to be the title I made up. Especially given one of the MIDIs is by the person I originally gave my MP3 to nearly 20 years ago, correlated with the fact the song has never been given an official title that I am aware of.)
Years ago there was a Wikipedia vandal who, for some reason, decided to randomly change some words in some articles to “aloha.” Some were caught, but at least one stuck around for years until I noticed it while doing research for an article1. By this time, it had made it to music listicles and techno-optimistic pedagogy blogs. The claim? That Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" originally began "aloha darkness, my old friend." Total horseshit, repeated nevertheless.
This apparently happens all the time. Wikipedia has a superlatives page about itself, tracking things like the most viewed article, the longest article -- and the longest time vandalism has gone unnoticed in an article. The article that holds this record is a list of Guggenheim Fellowship winners, where someone changed author Helen DeWitt's name to "Mike Oxbig" (say it out loud). This went unnoticed for 15 years and 29 days.
Shit's concerning.
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not on Wikipedia, I saw it on one of the aforementioned listicles
