Reliable sources and blogger ethics panels

I know a lot of you have been asking yourselves, “Why doesn’t LGM have more Fred Bonine content? Is one 2000-word post every 18 years really enough?”

No, no it isn’t. So let’s talk about Fred’s Wiki page.

This past weekend I behooved it upon myself to become the world’s leading living expert on Fred Bonine. In the course of this labor I discovered that the good doctor’s Wikipedia page, which has existed for a decade now, was pretty much a brazen tissue of wild exaggerations and outright lies.

For example, I determined with Aristotelian rigor and Platonic logic that the page’s claim that Bonine held the world record in the 110-yard dash for 35 years was just some cockeyed legend cooked up 40 years after the purported fact, by the publicists for the Dempsey-Wills heavyweight championship fight (Many thanks to the pseudonymous commenter ThreeHouse, who dug up snippets from the 1886 editions of the New York Times and Harvard Crimson, to help nail down the precise details of this story. Not all heroes wear capes).

Now while I admit that it would be difficult to even imagine a more trivial historical question than “did Fred Bonine actually ever run 110 yards in 10.8 seconds?” there’s a broader point here, which indeed is the point of this post.

Despite my if I may say so herculean labors, Bonine’s Wiki page still contains the fake 10.8 second in the 110 yard world record claim. Why? Because a blog post isn’t a “reliable source,” per Wikipedia’s exacting standards regarding documentation of claims! However, obviously fake “facts” planted by boxing match publicists in newspapers 40 years after the purported events took place do count as reliable sources. (There’s a colloquy on the Fred Bonine Wiki Talk Page — one of the hottest spots on the Internet at the moment — between myself and LGM reader JBL, who is trying to get a conversation started among the Wiki powers that be about this general issue).

As I said in the original Bonine post, I’m a big fan of Wikipedia: I think it’s an immensely valuable resource, and all the more admirable because it’s a kind of public good, produced on an almost completely volunteer basis. But this little vignette highlights a weakness in the enterprise’s structure — one that implicates much broader questions about what should or shouldn’t count as a “reliable source” of information, in this crazy world where the actual facts of the matter in the case of World Famous Doctor Who Was Also the World’s Fastest Man don’t amount to a hill of beans.