[DannyDover]

(Disclaimer: I wrote this post)

What made you feel it was untrustworthy? I have a huge amount of respect for the Hacker News community (been reading this site everyday for over a year), and I would really appreciate the opportunity to be given constructive criticism.

[diN0bot]

Danny, thanks for replying so fast. Makes conversing much easier :-)

I certainly didn't mean to cast negative light on the post. I sent a link to my friends at work with the text: "Seems like a well intentioned best effort, but there are surprisingly little links to source or archive material."

I could just be a lazy jerk who doesn't want to get blamed if one piece of information happens to be wrong. Probably I should have just said "work in progress", as you did.

I did greatly appreciate the note at the bottom of the post about work-in-progress and pooling-knowledge. The honest are typically interested in openness and collaboration.

The reason why I felt like a disclaimer was necessary in my comment and to my friends was that I personally hadn't verified the claims you had made, and it wasn't obvious to me that the information was correct. I would expect to see a note on methodology: were you cycling through refreshes of different web pages? or noting "last change" dates in webpages? Are there internetarchive.com (or equivalent) perma-links that should exactly when stories occured? The wikipedia timeline highlighting is totally obvious (and easy); I'd simply like to see that kind of thing for more of the "facts". Where did the information come from. If you state it I'll believe you and feel pretty confident in the information (would probably verify later if wanted to publish an academic paper or something, but otherwise good 'nuf for random intuition :-)

Maybe I'm just paranoid in general when it comes to news.

That said, your timeline really is the bomb. It's super interesting, and I appreciate the work you did :-)

[DannyDover]

Thank you for the honest feedback and no offense taken :-)

I will be sure to make it a priority to include sources and methodology in future posts. I didn't include these in the first place because I got the impression that the audience I primarily write for (the community at SEOmoz) doesn't worry about this as much and would rather get to the "meat" of the information. If you read the comments on the post, no one even mentions sources or methodology.

That said, I am always looking for ways to make my posts better and I think acting on your advice will make my work appear more credible and professional. Thank you for your time and feedback!

[dc2k08]

x17online.com were the first to report he was rushed to UCLA but even they acknowledge that it was TMZ who broke the story that he was dead.

[gort]

In the Wikipedia article history, I can find the edit you mention at 21:12 and the edit freeze at 21:45, but not the edit you mention at 21:48...

This page should show the relevant part of the history: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Jackson&#3...

I would say Wikipedia confirmed the death at 22:27, just after MSNBC and CNN, which is consistent with Wikipedia policy of relying on mainstream sources.

[DannyDover]

This is very odd. When I viewed the page (see screenshot taken at 22:56 below) I saw his death added to the article twice, once at 21:46 by editor "fixman" and then again at 21:48 by an anonymous editor.

Update: User Gort pointed out that I was looking at the talk page of the article revision history rather than the revision history itself. Easy mistake to make. Post updated and tail between my legs...

[gort]

That's the talk page history, not the article history.