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Errors in the summary of the featured article

Please do not remove this invisible timestamp. See WT:ERRORS and WP:SUBSCRIBE. - Dank (push to talk) 01:24, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Errors in "Did you know ..."

Current DYK

Possible T. rex coprolite

Poozeum

• ... that the Poozeum holds fossilized dinosaur feces (pictured) which may have come from a T. rex?

There are multiple issues:

• The copyright status of the image is not quite clear and is currently being challenged.
• WP:DYKHOOK specifies that hooks should be a "definite fact". Words like "may have" and "possible" are not definite.
• The sources in the article for the Tyrannosaurus rex connection are not respectable or reliable, being ClickOrlando and Thrillist. For example, Thrillist says that this is the "largest discovered coprolite" but it isn't because it forgot the word "carnivore". That site feels quite unsafe and so we shouldn't be using using it when there are more respectable sources like the BBC. Notice that the BBC also reports the "largest coprolite found that belongs to a carnivore" too but is more careful to not add the T. Rex hype.
• The coprolite is named Barnum. P. T. Barnum didn't actually say "there's a sucker born every minute" but instead that you should "Preserve your integrity".

Andrew🐉(talk) 06:14, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

@RoySmith: pinging. BorgQueen (talk) 08:46, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

@Gobonobo: pinging. BorgQueen (talk) 08:47, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

I trust that the image was uploaded by the copyright owner mostly based on this exchange. The crux of the deletion argument is that it is not similarly marked as CC-BY-SA on the website. To the guideline requiring a definite fact that is unlikely to change, we could say it definitely could be a T. rex coprolite, and that uncertainty is unlikely to change. Truth is, it is notoriously difficult to ascertain the creator of a coprolite. We know it was from a carnivore and that T. rex were found in the same area. I know of no larger coprolites. gobonobo ^{+ c} 10:41, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Guinness World Records accepts that this is the largest known carnivore coprolite so why don't we just give that well-supported fact? The T. Rex maybe is not needed. Andrew🐉(talk) 11:33, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Fridge smuggling

• ... that a £142 wine fridge was smuggled into Downing Street on 11 December 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom?

Per smuggling, this is illegal transportation. But the delivery of a refrigerator by an ordinary supplier seems to have been quite open, normal and legal. The word "smuggled" comes from a headline in a British red-top tabloid and this is not an acceptable source for an accusation of crime. See WP:TABLOID, WP:HEADLINES, &c. Andrew🐉(talk) 09:23, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

• ALT3 ("Wine Time Fridays") is now fine as an alternative, as I've added an extra cite so that it's not just the Mirror. (However said red-top tabloid was the one that broke the Partygate story and I don't believe any of its reporting has been challenged, so it's probably OK anyway). Black Kite (talk) 10:05, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

• The nomination had a fraught history and was previously pulled by AirshipJungleman29 for violating WP:DYKHOOKBLP. I agree that there are significant WP:BLP issues here. And the page is poor quality as it's not a properly balanced article; just a WP:PROSELINE collection of newspaper headlines. Andrew🐉(talk) 10:26, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
  • That is the typical format of a Wikipedia:Timeline. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 10:31, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

"Smuggled" does not have to mean "illegal", just "illicit". ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 10:30, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

"Illicit" means much the same thing. The point is that having a refrigerator delivered is not and was not any kind of crime or immorality. The tabloid was just trying to milk the story because it had a photo of the delivery. The photo shows that it was quite open and not clandestine in any way. Andrew🐉(talk) 10:52, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Illicit does not mean the same thing, because WP:BLPCRIME is not then involved. At the height of the pandemic, when indoor gatherings were banned, the delivery of a wine fridge for use in indoor gatherings was very much immoral, although not in itself illegal. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 11:23, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

But who's to say it's immoral? The Paymaster General defended the Downing Street fridges in a formal statement,

Downing Street is a working building, including catering facilities and offices for staff; as is common in workplaces including the House of Commons, refrigerators are provided for general staff use. One refrigerator was purchased in the financial year for a Downing Street meeting room, and one to replace an existing refrigerator that had reached the end of its working operation. Notwithstanding, I can confirm that no such public expenditure was accrued in relation to the matters considered in the investigations by the Second Permanent Secretary or connected with associated media reports on this matter.

So, where's the reliable source establishing that this was illicit or immoral smuggling? All we seem to have is a tabloid headline. 14:35, 13 August 2024 (UTC) Andrew🐉(talk) 14:35, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Isn't the paymaster just saying there are fridges that they pay for, but the wine fridge was not paid for with public funds? Which means this was an off-book fridge. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:54, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Environmental impacts of artificial intelligence

• ... that researchers estimated that training the model for ChatGPT used the equivalent energy footprint of "driving 123 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles for a year"?

The word "estimated" immediately tells us that this is not a definite fact, as required by WP:DYKHOOK. So I checked on its origin. This turns out to be a paper in arXiv: Carbon Emissions and Large Neural Network Training.

So far as I can tell, this has not been peer-reviewed, validated or confirmed. arXiv papers are considered unreliable here per WP:RSPS. But, in this case, the paper's estimate was picked up for an essay in The Conversation and that was then reprinted by Scientific American.

And when you look at the detail, you find that, while the original paper presented the estimated energy cost as equivalent to 3 round-trip jet plane flights from NYC to San Francisco, the essay writer chose to present this as 123 "gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for one year". Such conversions depend on your choice of jet plane and passenger vehicle, of course. And, literally YMMV!

So, we see that there has been a chain of estimates and conversions which make the computation fuzzier at each stage. And now this fuzzy data is in Wikipedia where it will be used to train the AI models! Is this science or is it churnalism?

Andrew🐉(talk) 14:10, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Next-but-one DYK

In the fourth hook, "The American Pigeon Museum & Library", The being uppercase appears in only one of the refs, most don't include the word at all let alone capitalise it. Primergrey (talk) 08:40, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

@TCMemoire: pinging. BorgQueen (talk) 08:44, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

This was something I struggled to figure out. But per the website's copyright notice and their official Facebook page, "The" is included in the official name, although the branding omits it. – TCMemoire 08:51, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Per MOS:THEINST, "the word the at the start of a name is uncapitalized in running text, regardless of the institution's own usage". TSventon (talk) 09:47, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Errors in the summary of the featured list

Friday's FL

(August 16)

Monday's FL

(August 19)

Errors in the summary of the featured picture

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