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![]() | A fact from Lighthouse and naval vessel urban legend appeared on Wikipedia's
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Did you know column on 24 September 2011 (
check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
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Does how this is done strike anyone as strange: The earliest known version of the joke appeared in a single-panel cartoon, reproduced from the London tabloid weekly The Humorist by the Canadian newspaper The Drumheller Review in 1931 If it was for citation reasons I could understand it (if the Canadian version could be cited but The Humorist not) but given that neither has a citation why mention the Canadian reproduction? It makes it sound like the reproduction was somehow the original, almost. Auto98uk ( talk) 17:30, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
I think the idea is that no one's ever found a copy of the cited original, making the reproduction the oldest verifiable original, I guess. Daniel Case ( talk) 18:05, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
Multiple editors have been trying to add a variation of this hoax (with this youtube video attached as the most recent source) to the Cape Finisterre Lighthouse article, since it was created almost ten years ago. Anyone know of any other lighthouse or ship articles this bogus anecdote may have also been added to? - wolf 07:23, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
@ Daniel Case: MOS:OL says explicitly that major countries should not be wikilinked. Canada, Ireland, and Spain are major, well-known countries without anything to confuse readers. I could see linking to Eswatini because it recently changed its name, or to Tuvalu, which is very small and not well known among North Americans, but Spain? -- really? MOS:OL also says "Be conservative when linking within quotations", so linking Newfoundland within the supposed transcript (which already makes it clear that it is part of Canada) doesn't seem helpful, especially since the whole anecdote is fictional and the identity of the place is not important. Same comment about the link to the United States Fleet Forces Command -- it is clear that this is referring to the United States Navy in the Atlantic; the organizational structure of the Navy is hardly relevant here. As for rewriting "Washington State" to "the U.S. state of Washington", I don't think there's any real danger that readers would think that Washington is a state of Australia, Germany, Brazil, etc. Finally, MOS:OL says that common words understood by most readers should not be linked. For "lighthouse", the link to List of lighthouses in Newfoundland and Labrador is not helpful since (again) this is a fictional story and probably does not refer to any real lighthouse, while also violating the Easter Egg condition. For "egotism" and "cliché", this isn't useful since the article is not "particularly relevant to the context in the article" (unlike, say, articles about narcissism or literary style). Best, -- Macrakis ( talk) 15:08, 18 October 2023 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Lighthouse and naval vessel urban legend article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
![]() | This article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | A fact from Lighthouse and naval vessel urban legend appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the
Did you know column on 24 September 2011 (
check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
| ![]() |
Does how this is done strike anyone as strange: The earliest known version of the joke appeared in a single-panel cartoon, reproduced from the London tabloid weekly The Humorist by the Canadian newspaper The Drumheller Review in 1931 If it was for citation reasons I could understand it (if the Canadian version could be cited but The Humorist not) but given that neither has a citation why mention the Canadian reproduction? It makes it sound like the reproduction was somehow the original, almost. Auto98uk ( talk) 17:30, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
I think the idea is that no one's ever found a copy of the cited original, making the reproduction the oldest verifiable original, I guess. Daniel Case ( talk) 18:05, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
Multiple editors have been trying to add a variation of this hoax (with this youtube video attached as the most recent source) to the Cape Finisterre Lighthouse article, since it was created almost ten years ago. Anyone know of any other lighthouse or ship articles this bogus anecdote may have also been added to? - wolf 07:23, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
@ Daniel Case: MOS:OL says explicitly that major countries should not be wikilinked. Canada, Ireland, and Spain are major, well-known countries without anything to confuse readers. I could see linking to Eswatini because it recently changed its name, or to Tuvalu, which is very small and not well known among North Americans, but Spain? -- really? MOS:OL also says "Be conservative when linking within quotations", so linking Newfoundland within the supposed transcript (which already makes it clear that it is part of Canada) doesn't seem helpful, especially since the whole anecdote is fictional and the identity of the place is not important. Same comment about the link to the United States Fleet Forces Command -- it is clear that this is referring to the United States Navy in the Atlantic; the organizational structure of the Navy is hardly relevant here. As for rewriting "Washington State" to "the U.S. state of Washington", I don't think there's any real danger that readers would think that Washington is a state of Australia, Germany, Brazil, etc. Finally, MOS:OL says that common words understood by most readers should not be linked. For "lighthouse", the link to List of lighthouses in Newfoundland and Labrador is not helpful since (again) this is a fictional story and probably does not refer to any real lighthouse, while also violating the Easter Egg condition. For "egotism" and "cliché", this isn't useful since the article is not "particularly relevant to the context in the article" (unlike, say, articles about narcissism or literary style). Best, -- Macrakis ( talk) 15:08, 18 October 2023 (UTC)