The Universe of Discourse

Notable items missing from English Wikipedia

Want to write a new Wikipedia article but can't think of a subject not already covered? Here are some items that are notable and should be easy to source:

• Richard Dattner, U.S. proponent of the “Adventure Playground” movement and designer of playgrounds, including the famous one in New York's Central Park near 67th Street.

• Publications International v. Meredith Corp, U.S. federal law case that held that while cookbooks are protected by copyright, the recipes themselves are not.

• Dorrance H. Hamilton Charitable Trust. Hamilton was heir to the Campbell's Soup fortune and a noted philanthropist. Her name is on many buildings and other institutions around the Philadelphia area. Wikipedia does have an article about Hamilton, but it is sadly incomplete and does not mention the Trust.

• Victor Dubourg, a journalist who angered Louis XV with his criticism, was induced to visit France under some pretext, and then was kidnapped and imprisoned in Mont-Saint-Michel for the rest of his life. Stories about the conditions of his confinement vary, ranging from the awful and terrifying to the terrifying and awful. (French Wikipedia)

• Knox v. United States. Knox was convicted of possession of child pornography for owning videotapes of girls in leotards and swimsuits but not engaged in sexual acts or even simulated acts. The U.S. Solicitor General, in a confession of error, joined in Knox's plea to the Supreme Court to vacate the conviction. The Court agreed and remanded the case to the lower court — which convicted him again. Knox appealed the second conviction, but the Solicitor General again changed their view and this time supported the conviction!

• Branly Cadet, U.S. sculptor, created the Octavius V. Catto memorial at Philadelphia City Hall, and the Jackie Robinson sculpture at Dodger Statdium.

• The Rowland Company, founded 1732, oldest still-operating manufacturing company in the U.S.. There are older businesses, but they are mostly taverns and inns.

• Beth Irene Stroud, ordained Methodist minister who came out as lesbian and was consequently defrocked in 2004. The United Methodist Church “affirms that all people are of sacred worth and are equally valuable in the sight of God” but apparently draws the line at lesbian ministers.

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The 1943 Bengal famine

A couple of years ago I was reading Wikipedia's article about the the 1943 Bengal famine, and I was startled by the following claim:

"If food is so scarce, why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?"

Winston Churchill's response to an urgent request to release food stocks for India.

It was cited, but also marked with the “not in citation” tag, which is supposed to mean that someone checked the reference and found that it did not actually support the claim.

It sounded like it might be the sort of scurrilous lie that is widely repeated but not actually supportable, so I went to follow it up. It turned out that although the quotation was not quite exact, it was not misleadingly altered, and not a scurrilous lie at all. The attributed source (Tharoor, Shashi "The Ugly Briton". Time, (29 November 2010).) claimed:

Churchill's only response to a telegram from the government in Delhi about people perishing in the famine was to ask why Gandhi hadn't died yet.

I removed the “not in citation” tag, which I felt was very misleading.

Still, I felt that anything this shocking should be as well-supported as possible. It cited Tharoor, but Tharoor could have been mistaken. So I put in some effort and dug up the original source. It is from the journal entry of Archibald Wavell, then Viceroy of India, of 5 July 1944:

Winston sent me a peevish telegram to ask why Gandhi hadn't died yet! He has never answered my telegram about food.

This appears in the published version of Lord Wavell's journals. (Wavell, Archibald Percival. Wavell: The Viceroy's journal, p. 78. Moon, Penderel, ed. Oxford University Press, 1973.) This is the most reliable testimony one could hope for. The 1973 edition is available from the Internet Archive.

A few months later, the entire article was massively overhauled by a group of anglophiles and Churchill-rehabilitators. Having failed to remove the quotation for being uncited, and then having failed to mendaciously discredit the cited source, they removed the quotation in a typical episode of Wikipedia chicanery. In a 5,000-word article, one sentence quoting the views of the then-current British Prime Minister was deemed “undue weight”, and a failure to “fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources”.

Further reading: In Winston Churchill, Hollywood rewards a mass murderer. (Tharoor again, in last week's Washington Post.)

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Ysolo has been canceled

An earlier article discussed how I discovered that a hoax item in a Wikipedia list had become the official name of a mountain, Ysolo Mons, on the planet Ceres.

I contacted the United States Geological Survey to point out the hoax, and on Wednesday I got the following news from their representative:

Thank you for your email alerting us to the possibility that the name Ysolo, as a festival name, may be fictitious.

After some research, we agreed with your assessment. The IAU and the Dawn Team discussed the matter and decided that the best solution was to replace the name Ysolo Mons with Yamor Mons, named for the corn/maize festival in Ecuador. The WGPSN voted to approve the change.

Thank you for bringing the matter to our attention.

(“WGPSN” is the IAU's Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. Here's their official announcement of the change, the USGS record of the old name and the USGS record of the new name.)

This week we cleaned up a few relevant Wikipedia articles, including one on Italian Wikipedia, and Ysolo has been put to rest.

I am a little bit sad to see it go. It was fun while it lasted. But I am really pleased about the outcome. Noticing the hoax, following it up, and correcting the name of this mountain is not a large or an important thing, but it's a thing that very few people could have done at all, one that required my particular combination of unusual talents. Those opportunities are seldom.

[ Note: The USGS rep wishes me to mention that the email I quoted above is not an official IAU communication. ]

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Imaginary Albanian eggplant festivals… IN SPACE

Wikipedia has a list of harvest festivals which includes this intriguing entry:

Ysolo: festival marking the first day of harvest of eggplants in Tirana, Albania

(It now says “citation needed“; I added that yesterday.)

I am confident that this entry, inserted in July 2012 by an anonymous user, is a hoax. When I first read it, I muttered “Oh, what bullshit,” but then went looking for a reliable source, because you never know. I have occasionally been surprised in the past, but this time I found clear evidence of a hoax: There are only a couple of scattered mentions of Ysolo on a couple of blogs, all from after 2012, and nothing at all in Google Books about Albanian eggplant celebrations. Nor is there an article about it in Albanian Wikipedia.

But reality gave ground before I arrived on the scene. Last September NASA's Dawn spacecraft visited the dwarf planet Ceres. Ceres is named for the Roman goddess of the harvest, and so NASA proposed harvest-related names for Ceres’ newly-discovered physical features. It appears that someone at NASA ransacked the Wikipedia list of harvest festivals without checking whether they were real, because there is now a large mountain at Ceres’ north pole whose official name is Ysolo Mons, named for this spurious eggplant festival. (See also: NASA JPL press release; USGS Astrogeology Science Center announcement.)

To complete the magic circle of fiction, the Albanians might begin to celebrate the previously-fictitious eggplant festival. (And why not? Eggplants are lovely.) Let them do it for a couple of years, and then Wikipedia could document the real eggplant festival… Why not fall under the spell of Tlön and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet?

Happy Ysolo, everyone.

[ Addendum 20161208: Ysolo has been canceled ]

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The worst literature reference ever

I think I may have found the single worst citation on Wikipedia. It's in the article on sausage casing. There is the following very interesting claim:

Reference to a cooked meat product stuffed in a goat stomach like a sausage was known in Babylon and described as a recipe in the world’s oldest cookbook 3,750 years ago.

That was exciting, and I wanted to know more. And there was a citation, so I could follow up!

The citation was:

(Yale Babylonian collection, New Haven Connecticut, USA)

I had my work cut out for me. All I had to do was drive up to New Haven and start translating their 45,000 cuneiform tablets until I found the cookbook.

(I tried to find a better reference, and turned up the book The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia. The author, Jean Bottéro, was the discoverer of the cookbook, or rather he was the person who recognized that this tablet was a cookbook and not a pharmacopoeia or whatever. If the Babylonian haggis recipe is anywhere, it is probably there.)

[ Addendum 20230516: Renan Gross has brought to my attention that the Yale tablets are now available online, so it is no longer necessary to go all the way to New Haven. There are several tablets of cluinary recipes. ]

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