We're in the thick of election season, and I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone out there that the Internet has proven to be a spectacular source of misinformation. Some recent stories that have come out recently have made this very clear to me.
The first, more entertaining one is the recent three-part series posted by Buzzerblog.com, a blog devoted to game shows, that tried to confirm the existence of a rumored lost episode of the PBS kids' game show "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego" where a contestant had been injured. After contacting multiple people connected with the show, archivists, and television stations, reporter Christian Carrion concluded that the episode had never existed, and every bit of information out there on the web about it had been fabricated. This information includes multiple Wiki pages with quotes from the episode, mentions by websites like Mental Floss, and even a page at the Lost Media Archive that has since been corrected.
This is far from the first instance of misinformation about a piece of kids' entertainment being taken as fact. A more egregious example, pointed out by a commenter on Reddit, is the admission by reporter Jordan Minor in 2016 that he had essentially invented an extra season of the '90s cartoon "Street Sharks," complete with voice credits and episode descriptions, and then submitted the information to various sites like TV Tome when he was in middle school. The information proliferated all over the internet, to the point where some "Street Sharks" fans were convinced that they remembered characters and episodes that Minor had made up. His admission of guilt is titled "How I Used Lies About A Cartoon to Prove History is Meaningless on the Internet."
You've probably heard of the Mandela effect, the phenomenon where false memories can be shared by different people, sometimes spontaneously. There is no 1990s genie movie starring the comedian "Sinbad," and the Berenstain Bears were never the Berenstein Bears. However, due to factors like misinformation, lack of correction, and other types of reinforcement, the false memories can proliferate. I've experienced several instances of this related to pop culture from when I was very young. For instance, I was convinced for years that I had seen an '80s version of "Land of the Lost," which was probably my mind combining memories with a different adventure show involving river rafting. But I was convinced enough for a while, that I definitely argued about it on the Internet, and probably spread some misinformation myself.
And this is all kind of fun and amusing when we're looking at pop culture examples, but of course, it's not just pop culture. Over in the linguistics world, there's been a big uproar over the Scots language version of Wikipedia. It turns out that nearly half of the wiki's entries - thousands and thousands of pages - had been written by an American teenager who didn't actually know any Scottish. Most of his entries are mangled gibberish taken from auto-translation tools, or straight copies of English entries with a couple of misspelled Scottish words tossed in the mix. From the contributor's statements, it seems like no malice was intended, but the damage is extensive. Not only does this mean that half of the Scots wiki is essentially garbage, but all the linguistics and translations tools that used it as a reference are likewise in trouble. And everyone who ever used those tools for Scottish translations is also screwed. The Wiki administrators are still debating whether to try and fix the errors, or to just scrap all the bad entries and start over.
The Scots Wiki disaster was made possible because there was very little oversight by the people in charge. Anyone can edit Wiki entries, and the organization relies heavily on its contributors. Unfortunately the Scottish language wiki, and many of the other wikis for various languages, have few contributors and thus a bad apple can have an outsized impact. The rogue contributor started out as a twelve year-old who thought that he was being helpful, and it wasn't until seven years and over twenty thousand entries later that somebody finally noticed what was going on.
And so, as we continue along in the season of "fake news" and QAnon conspiracies, keep some of these examples in mind. If a couple of misguided kids and pranksters could rewrite people's memories and mess with an entire language, think about what the real baddies are doing on the Internet.
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