mimicofmodes:marzipanandminutiae:jaspertheshark:lesbianbrachiosaurus:Seriously tho as someone who pu
mimicofmodes:marzipanandminutiae:jaspertheshark:lesbianbrachiosaurus:Seriously tho as someone who put literal years of effort into creating a Wikipedia hoax it’s basically impossible to get away with for more than like an hour. They’re fucking vigilant. I tried to build up trust by doing legit editing but my account got reviewed cause I approved a page that mismeasured the size of a ship by a few centimetersyou cant use wikipedia in a bibliography because it is an encyclopedia and encyclopedias cannot be cited because they are not sources BUT they have ALL the sources listed and linked if possible and i will never forgive teachers for teaching us instead that it is not a reliable resourceDo evaluate the sources themselves, though. A lot of articles have good scholarly sources, but the article for “Victorian mourning dolls” (probably not a widespread thing IRL) cites a bunch of unsourced blog postsThere’s nothing wrong with using Wikipedia for a basic summary, but please do not use it as your main source in anything!- I had to rewrite the Wikipedia page on the effects of tight-lacing several years ago because it was terrible, and people were citing it in online debates as a trump card. It took every claim of destroyed livers, breast cancer, etc. seriously, citing sources from ca. 1900. It also took the effects we know from modern tight-lacers, like constipation and skin rashes, and then found modern medical articles saying that e.g. constipation and skin rashes can kill if they’re severe enough, and used them to justify saying that tight-lacing could be very dangerous.- The Agnes Sorel article used to say that she started wearing low-cut gowns “with a single breast fully bared”, a myth that comes from a conflation of contemporary criticisms of her for sexy dressing and the famous portrait of her as the Virgin Mary with a breast out to nurse. The citation was to Histoires de mode by Monique Canellas-Zimmer, a book with no citations itself, formatted with full-page illustrations of figures from French history opposite descriptions of what they’re wearing and maybe some biographical information. (When I deleted this, my edit was initially reverted because I didn’t explain why. Sometimes Wikipedia’s strictness can get in the way of making it more accurate.)- Many years ago I was in a furious war on the page for the robe à la polonaise. It’s been fairly well established now that the polonaise had a special cut without a waist seam, etc. but at that time, the only “official” secondary source saying that was Norah Waugh, and EVERYONE used the term to mean “a gown with the skirts tucked up”. All I really wanted to do was to replace the main photo (of a gown mislabeled as a polonaise by LACMA) with a fashion plate unambiguously labeled “robe à la polonaise”, and I got reamed out because this was based on original research (primary sources in French stated the proper definition of a polonaise) and the person who’d decided it was her page was a 25-year veteran of reenacting and didn’t like a youngster with a degree in fashion history saying that what she knew was wrong. It was some years before the page got corrected, after Kendra Van Cleave published her article on the polonaise.Wikipedia isn’t reliable. These are all success stories, but before these articles were fixed people were reading them and taking them seriously because “the editors are so vigilant and the rules are so strict”.If you want a reliable free source on the internet, try AskHistorians. -- source link
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