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How a Stoned Teen's Wikipedia Hoax Is Still Fooling Scholars and Experts

Welcome to Reading List, Gizmodo's weekend collection of the best writing from around the web. Today we've got pieces from The Daily Dot, Motherboard, Medium, and more!

  • EJ Dickson explains how a joke "fact" she and a friend added to the Amelia Bedelia Wikipedia page in 2009 (while stoned) fooled scholars, authors, and even Herman Parish, the nephew of author Peggy Parish who has been writing new entries in the Amelia Bedelia series since his aunt's death. [The Daily Dot]
  • Joe Zadeh examines the strange, sci-fi history of the many ways sound has been used as a weapon, and the ways that modern police and military forces plan on using it for crowd control and other uses. [Motherboard]
  • Rebecca Flint Marx looks at the relationship between chefs, restaurateurs, and Yelpers, and comes away with a surprising conclusion: the strained, conflicted, tormented love-hate interplay between the food industry and the app users who review it has all the psychological hallmarks of an abusive relationship. [San Francisco Magazine]
  • Paul Ford, as only Paul Ford can, takes a delightfully deep dive into something you've probably never paid explicit attention to: the architecture of the rooms that serve as the backdrop for so many awkward, amateurish, weird YouTube videos. You've seen them a million times—the angle of a webcam pointed at a beige wall and white ceiling in some midwestern basement is a totem of internet culture—but you've probably never thought about them this deeply. [Medium]
  • Eric Geller gives us the history of "whoa if true," the oft-typed Twitter semi-joke-turned shorthand for "conditional but still premature emotional reactions;" and why such a strangely specific form of reaction is so central to our always-on internet news cycle. [The Daily Dot]
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