Comment by kieselguhr_kid

I think Twilight was the first novel from the author and she pretty much wrote a transcript, and got a book deal off the back of it. She had little previous experience in writing novels and was just very, very lucky that it happened to all fall in to place... some first time novelists spend years trying to do what she did.

If you are referring to "War of the worlds " the radio broadcast indicates it is a audio drama. He couldn't have intended for people to think it is real just because the audio drama is in the form of a news broadcast.

> I don't think Wikipedia is as closely vetted as we assume.

I keep finding gross errors in random pages that I visit for other reasons. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_toast

All of this article's references to French toast being described in the Roman Empire are straight-up lies. Interestingly, this is already noted on the talk page, but that has had no effect on the text of the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Shimei_and_Qin_Xianglian

In the "History" section of this article, we see that the characters appeared in a book in 1595, and that they are based on a real-life official (and his wife) of the Qing dynasty, which began in 1644.

The problem with Wikipedia moderation is that is all done by people that care about the subject. If you pick a subject that no one cares too much about, you can easily deface it with non true information.

The other issue is the war cry "you are a sock puppet!" Many seem to use this to try to force their opinion to be heard. I saw this first hand once and it can get ugly.

Kozierok's Law accounts for much of this:

"The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic."

Well they don't have the same threat model. Teenagers and grifters can't edit as easily in the case of a commercial publisher. That's not to say that they don't have their flaws, or that they are superior to Wikipedia. Just that the analysis is off the mark.

I often notice after the fact when it blows up.

Consider the situation with XScreenLock in Debian when it was found that the code had a timer in it that bugged people to update when using an unsupported version. Once the timer reached this point and many received this update, Debian immediately patched it to remove it as many found it annoying and it was a controversial move, but to me the most interesting part was that it was in the code, publically; it was added at one point,and no one at Debian knew.

This timer that merely annoyed users into updating could just as easily been serious malware that no one would have noticed that lay dormant to awaken at a set date.

Importantly, this only applies to the subsets of financial media that traders pay money for. Bloomberg's free news is garbage opinion pieces, but the stuff you pay (a lot) for is generally decent.

> financial newspapers often stick closer to the truth

Are you sure?

From my limited experience, there is a huge amount of fictitious narrative in financial news. I just had a look at https://www.barrons.com/ - hard to say how much is just opinions of the journalist, but not much looked fact based.

Even a biased account of history is a record of history, in some ways even more interesting when you have other biased accounts to compare with.

Goofy as his methods are, Herodotus is a very compelling read specifically because it's not one coherent narrative, but a collection of points-of-view (none of which may be entirely correct, but reflect what people claimed at least).

> that fact doesn’t seem to be popular.

No its because he question to concept of truth itself. Literally everybody knows history writing is manipulated for many reasons.

But in my observation, however in my view historiography is often far more complex then reflecting simply political desires.