Back in the 1990’s, a friend was using newly-digitized newspapers from the late 1800’s to research a biography of Herman Melville. What he found was that contemporaneous newspaper mentions of Melville created a quite different (and more interesting) life journey than the established 20th-century biographies had recorded. Then, on researching those biographies, he realized that woozles abounded, having been lifted from previous biographies that included inaccurate data.

i once belonged to the61 dot com back in the beginning of the site. there was later a crisis created by the founders of the site who kept telling the users that we were "doing it wrong" and slowly bled off everything which had made the site worth going to.

in the aftermath of that i was part of a group who had left the site "together" and so we gathered at a place called plurk and then in a group at facebook and set to getting to know each other better and one of them turned out to be a terrible vaccine crank. he kept insisting we read this huge pdf file he had compiled or found somewhere with dozens of articles from various journals. half of them came from reputable journals like science, nature, or the new england journal of medicine while the other half were from venues like the journal of naturopathic medicine . . .

the latter articles were uniformly anti-vax but the articles from the major journals said the direct opposite of what he was claiming they did. when i pointed this out to him he blocked me (shrugs).