User:Kitography

Hi! I'm Kitography, I like to fact-check random facts. Citations are a good thing for the world.

Busted: She's the Man was not released in 2005
She's the Man was released (both theatrically and on DVD) in 2006. It says so on the DVD box itself, and pages grabbing information from that. There are reviews of the movie from it's theatrical run in 2006. There are look-back articles to the premiere still available. It was even nominated to awards for 2006.

I could find no other internet source (even unreliable ones) that includes the date 2005 for the release of this movie. The initial change that introduced that to the wikipedia page was made by some random IP address pretty recently (January 5, 2024) ; I fixed that manually shortly after assuming it was some sort of mistake:. I didn't at the time tag that as a revert - or know how to do that.

The same incorrect edits were then re-applied again here. This doesn't even make sense - for instance, it's editing URLs to now go to nowhere, which is pretty bad. Trying to undo those edits, unfortunately can't be done automatically because (bots?) someone has edited since with conflicts. I'm not sure - I just got a conflict when I tried to edit. Looking back it's also muddied up who produced the picture (see below). I've done my best to revert those edits now, and fix all of the URLs.

Related Busted: who She's the Man produced by
Looking at the edit history the article of She's the Man has alternatively claimed it was produced by Dreamworks then Paramount. I don't know why it says that. Playing the DVD, I see the Dreamworks logo. I think that's a primary source though?

Note - once I fixed the URLs to what they were on the page, the "numbers" citation there identifies Dreamworks as distributing the DVD, an paramount doing the theatrical release.

Related Busted: Old School was released in 2003 not 2002
While looking at the edit history of the user(IP address) who first changed the correct 2006 date to the incorrect 2005 date, I noticed most of their changes had been tagged as reverted, but one of them - a change to The Montecito Picture Company page changes the year of when Old School was released from 2003 to 2002. It was released in 2003. So I've reverted that bad change too.

The Mystery
As of writing this, this appears on the List of deadliest floods without linking to an article; it got there copied from the page on Flood. The entry was added to the page Flood as part of a much larger edit on 22nd of Nov, 2008 by Poetaris. This entry in particular was not cited.

I've asked on Poetaris' talk page where that information came from. In doing so, I found out that the user has been blocked by user YellowMonkey, who seems to have left Wikipedia. This message from YellowMonkey claims that this user was a Sock farming. I'm therefore not expecting a response.

An early entry in the Flood edit which introduced this fact did have a citation: "http://www.nbc10.com/news/4030540/detail.html+Worst+Natural+Disasters+In+History". Unfortunately that particular link no longer leads to the article, and was not archived by the Wayback Machine. However, a similar link was referenced in an old Reddit post. That page, by NBC10, was archived by the Wayback Machine. That similar article does not list any 1993 incident.

At the time this information was added, citations already existing on the page were twelve references, twelve external links, and two options for further reading. Two in particular looked very relevant.
 * Further reading: "O'Connor, Jim E. and John E. Costa. (2004). The World's Largest Floods, Past and Present: Their Causes and Magnitudes [Circular 1254]. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey." looked promising, but the article only has two tables listing floods (on page 3 and 10), neither of which includes any flood that occurred in 1993.
 * Reference "Southasianfloods.org" looked relevant. Unfortunately, it currently links to a page titled "South Asian Foods" with a footer stating it was Copyright 2021.  Checking a much earlier version of the site, this did used to link to a page with an list of floods .  That webpage reads: "The archives are sourced from the 'NASA-supported Dartmouth Flood Observatory' provided at www.dartmouth.edu/artsci/geog/floods/ " - that is already listed as a source.

Following up on the source of southasianfloods.org, I found the list of floods compiled by Dartmouth they referenced still exists, and says 3,083 people died in the event with identification tag "1993-037" (the monsoon flood). That is one person off from the death toll claimed in the list of floods, which implies this isn't "the" reference used (or perhaps a typo?), but it looks like a reputable source.

Correcting the Minor Record (One Death Off, But Also Adding Citations)
To update this reference, I looked at the live website hosting the Dartmouth Flood Observatory, which is active, but does not seem to have the detailed notes (or any notes) about floods from before the year 2000, and seems to be looking a very restricted number of deaths (just India, and just a week of the flood period has 232 deaths, I guess) on line 778 of it's hard-to-read text-table. Failing to find a source with the full information available from the archived link, I've updated the reference to be to that link, and the number of deaths to match.

In doing this, I found an article which seems to reference the same flood, titled 1993 India floods. From the citation I found from the Dartmouth Flood Observatory, it lists that of the 3083 deaths, 1050 were from India, less than the 1800 from Nepal. That makes the tile India floods seem inappropriate, so I've asked on the talk page to rename it (or whether I should make a bigger page).

This claim was referenced by 1993 but the dates are very much known, so I've moved it to the official start according to the reference for death count used, and deleted that section, but added other sources that could support the "over four thousand" claim originally listed.

The list of floods page formerly improperly implied that this flood only hit India, so I've updated it to refer to this as South Asia instead.

This didn't just happen in Pakistan
When searching for the remarkably precise "3,084" deaths originally listed using a search engine, I came across a number of websites, tweets and even what looked like news articles that cited this number (unfortunately I haven't been able to get wayback machine to take a copy of the search results for a duckduckgo search, so these are the live ones). This included the page Climate of Pakistan which has implied since a September 2010 edit that the 3,084 deaths all occurred in Pakistan. The source which shows the 3,083 deaths separates out 15 of them as having occurred in Pakistan, so this is a huge difference. This change was made without adding a citation so I've contacted the user on their talk page.

I've done my due diligence looking for the citation from the above claim in case it was improperly cited. For instance, at the time this Monsoon was added to Climate of Pakistan, there were only thirteen references on the page, so I went through all of them and found nothing relevant:
 * (1) "http://www.pakmet.com.pk/latest%20news/Latest%20News.html" this is infact a latest news link, the earliest wayback capture is February 2010, where it does include weather advisories, but nothing about anything so far back as 1993.
 * (2) "http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1559&tstamp= " the only reference to Pakistan on this states it's hottest ever recorded temperature occured.
 * (3) "http://punjabgovt.nic.in/punjabataglance/SomeFacts.htm" No longer online, this has general information about Punjab. There is nothing directly about the 1993 Monsoons here.
 * (4) "http://www.pakmet.com.pk/latest%20news/Latest%20News.html" - this is identical to (1)
 * (5) "http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1559&tstamp=" - this is identical to (2)
 * (6) "http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1559&tstamp=" - this is identical to (2)
 * (7) "http://www.pakmet.com.pk/latest%20news/Latest%20News.html" - this is identical to (1)
 * (8) "http://www.essl.org/ECSS/2007/abs/02-Case-study/sheikh-1-sec02.oral.pdf" - looks to be about a thunderstorm in 2001
 * (9) "http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/extremes/2001/july/extremes0701.html" - the reference to Pakistan here is about torrential floods between July 21 - 31, 2001 "killed some 200 people", nothing to do with 1993
 * (10) "http://www.dawn.com/2002/07/27/local1.htm" - unfortunately this website is down, and wayback has not archived this particular entry on the site.
 * (11) "http://www.pakmet.com.pk/cdpc/Climate/Karachi_Climate_Data.txt" - this is heat and rainfall data for the Karachi Airport, 1993 is not noted as the year with the most rainfall in any month
 * (12) "http://www.pakmet.com.pk/journal/july2003floods-sindh.htm" - this has a lot of information on July 2003 floods in Pakistan, but 1993 is not mentioned
 * (13) "http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/03-pakistan-flood-crisis-bigger-than-tsunami-haiti-un-ss-05" - this looks like an article about Pakistan floods in 2010, 1993 is not mentioned.

I've also searched links from the Climate of Pakistan to other pages. For instance, there was a link to the page Geography_of_Pakistan which does not mention this 1993 incident. However, there was also a link to List of extreme weather records in Pakistan which does mention this, including the specific "3,084" deaths added in an edit with no citation that was added by the same user, Nabil rais. That edit does link to the Monsoon page. Looking at that page, nothing mentions flooding in 1993 at all. It does link to the Monsoon of South Asia page which has been split off since March, 2011 and also doesn't mention anything about 1993 or Pakistan beyond the initial link as part of South Asia.

While I await a response from Nabil rais, I have adjusted the wording, and added a citation on both of the pages this implication that the deaths were in Pakistan appeared: Climate of Pakistan, List of extreme weather records in Pakistan. I've also added an entry to the list of floods in Pakistan where it wasn't mentioned at all, because fifteen people did die, which is notable.

Beyond Wikipedia
I'm hesitant to link to the websites in play here due to how linking is used to measure the impact of websites, and I do not want to promote them further. Unfortunately, I haven't figure out how to store a DuckDuckGo Search results page on Wayback Machine, so I'm linking, below to the Wayback of the sites themselves:
 * One article on "Not PC" uses the same line precisely as the article Climate of Pakistan did: "In 1993, flooding during Monsoon rains killed 3,084 people." as part of a claim that the 2022 floods were not the "worst in history" for Pakistan.  I've attempted to leave a comment linking to this write-up.
 * Another article from the "Daily Sceptic" looks like an earlier, longer version of that article, where the author writes "The death toll from the current floods is estimated at just over 1,000 people. The two-minutes research I did found four Pakistan floods – 1950, 1992, 1993 and 2010 – which killed more than that." To leave a comment on this article requires paying money to sign in.
 * This claim is also echoed over Twitter. I don't have a Twitter.
 * Several links come up to papers which do not quote this statistic.
 * There are copies of the wikipedia article "Climate of Pakistan" for some reason.

Mostly Confirmed, Precision Unknown: 1992 flooding during Monsoon season killed 1,834 people across Pakistan
This is claimed in the articles where the misleading 1993 claim (see above), occurred, in particular Climate of Pakistan and List of extreme weather records in Pakistan where it was not cited as of writing this. However, the List of floods in Pakistan links to an full article about the event 1992 India–Pakistan floods, which has citations! Great! Those look pretty good - I'm not seeing the number 1,834 though. I checked the reference where I found this before, but there is no breakdown of the estimated 2750 dead between North India and Pakistan.

This is "mostly" correct - at least in the ballpark based on the citations on the 1992 India-Pakistan floods. However, a quick search doesn't show this particular number's source, so I've edited the pages Climate of Pakistan and List of extreme weather records in Pakistan to both add citation requests, and a link to the 1992 India-Pakistan floods page.

Busted?: The North Storm Flood of 1206 or 1212 that killed 60,000 people
The List of deadliest floods includes a reference (as of writing this) to a 60,000[citation needed]-casualty North Sea flood, storm surge in the Holy Roman Empire in 1212. The page on storm surges, as of writing this, lists 60,000 casualties as occurring in a different year, 1206. These dates are not the same.

This information on the List of deadliest floods was added as part of the mega change on the 22 November 2008. It is also not found on the attached citation to that edit.

The information on the Storm tides of the North Sea page was added as part of a change on, and citations were added in the next edit. Those citations are in Dutch, which I do not speak, so information here is based on google translate: Neither of these citations substantiates any flood happening on either of these two years.
 * (1) "Gevaar van water, water in gevaar uit 2001 ISBN 90-71736-21-0" - Portions of this book are available online, but I couldn't find a full copy, nor any section that matches the year 1206 or 1212.
 * (2) "Methode voor de bepaling van het aantal slachtoffers ten gevolge van een grootschalige overstroming, Ministerie van Verkeer en Waterstaat, Netherlands, 2004" - This is available online, and includes a table on page 16 includes a list of events, with the years (838, 1228, 1287, 1404, 1421, 1530, 1570, 1686, 1717, 1784, 1809, 1855, 1861, 1880, 1916, 1926, 1953). Neither the year 1206 nor 1212 appears anywhere in the document.

But searching for the former reference, I found that there does exist a page about this storm surge on the dutch wikipedia article(!), which has a citation(!). Translated, that citation links to a book and reads: "36,000 deaths and doubt whether there was a flood at all: Friedrich Arends, Natural history of the coasts of the North Sea, 1837, p.19. The total Dutch population at that time was approximately 400,000."

This looks like a credible source, so I made the edit to the list of deadliest floods to reflect what that source says. I've also updated the page on storm tides with that same information.