[tux3]

Hmm, on that 2004 Wikipedia page it lists the atomic weight of carbon as 12.0107, and the one link in the reference section (Los Alamos National Laboratory) lists it as 12.011.

That's the correct number for the molar mass of carbon, as far as I know, it doesn't look off by 3x!

[elif]

i don't think you understand whats being said or you are misquoting me intentionally in poor faith

[tux3]

I'm always happy to be corrected if I've misunderstood. I'm not sure what the link demonstrates, though, I opened it and I just don't see anything like you described.

About poor faith, these kind of accusations happens so often, there's plenty of existing essays and material on whether you should assume people are posting in bad faith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AOBF is a good reference, it's used pretty regularly.

[elif]

if you are genuinely interested in your misunderstanding, i would begin by listing the following assumptions you've made: - the element in my original anecdote was carbon - the wayback machine in 2004 captured a website exactly as it appeared in 2003

[Dylan16807]

Are you playing a game here?

Normally people provide relevant links. Even if this is showing bad sourcing, it still sources the important numbers. "External links" is helping with that too.

And this 2003 vs. 2004 distinction is a waste of time when wikipedia has a perfectly good history feature.

If I ask pretty please will you name the element?

[BeetleB]

I side with elif here.

> Normally people provide relevant links

It is relevant. It's pointing out that lots of articles back then were not well referenced. It doesn't have to be his article. I know this quite well as I added a lot of stuff to Wikipedia in those days, and never provided a reference. No one challenged me.

Likely the page he got his information from didn't provide any reference for that number.

[Dylan16807]

But the linked page has a very thorough source for its numbers; it just happens to be in the "external links" section. And looking through those links for a couple minutes they seem to pretty well cover the text.

The lines are not individually cited but that's a stylistic thing, not a failure to have references. I'm sure there's several lines without backing but overall this has reasonable links and I don't think it supports the narrative about having "one" reference and getting a "fundamental digital fact" wrong like that.

So I would like to see the real example. Or one that is equivalently bad. And linking it would be in the best interests of a fruitful discussion; it's not like a particular element is going to be a controversial issue that causes a time-wasting tangent.