Has Snopes.com ever been wrong?

I love the Snopes urban legends website

www.snopes.com...

but its popularity does beg the question: Has Snopes ever been wrong? How do we know that the Snopes team is finding the truth?



Not that they'd purposely print something that's incorrect, but that they could be mislead by someone else while searching for the truth...

Well, Snopes is one of the only sites that I know that actually look into it, so how reliable they are I'm not too sure, but I generally believe most the stuff the look into.

Considered to be very reliable and it's well-researched. They take the time to contact everyone and hunt down obscure references. They've got a team of researchers.

YES! they recanted on the suadi flights on sept 11 and this one i pulled em up on today about femma on arriving on 10 sept

www.snopes.com...

www.scoop.co.nz...

[Edited on 2-7-2004 by Teflon]

Looks respectable to me.

-Becs

they are wrong a lot. do your own research. don't be sheep.

They are wrong more than they care to admit.

Just don't rely on them for anything political!

4 years later and snopes.com seems to be adhering to unverified when they aren't sure... otherwise they seem to be spot on...

Next to ATS/BTS (of course) it is one of my Favorite sites. I agree that they are usually well researched and correct on a very broad range of subjects.

Originally posted by ThunderCloud

Not that they'd purposely print something that's incorrect, but that they could be mislead by someone else while searching for the truth...

snopes does occasionally deliberately print incorrect information as a "copyright trap"

Snopes - Sing a song of sixpence
TV show falls for it

Second post here snopes alludes to more of them.

Yes.

I authored a thread a while ago based on Snopes inaccurate presentation...

The North American Union Myth

As with all websites and those who are disseminating information...it is always prudent to do your own research and keep in mind that everything is quite possibly 'not right'...

Cheers...

Check out the Snope's team en.wikipedia.org...

Snopes and Myth Busters share the same problem: they both spend way too much time trying to prove negatives. They both seem to let their prejudices sway their research methods. Many questions just cannot be answered.

reply to post by ThunderCloud


I have found discrepancies in items that they post as being 'Mixture'. Most of these involve several different points of a story or an email. I have seen where they say one certain point is false, but I have found news paper and web pages reporting that certain point as being true.

reply to post by cavscout


Yeah I entirely agree with this, they tend to get swayed a bit, and it still keeps the question floating, sometimes I think too myself... what if they had tried it 'this way'...sometimes tests don't seem to be the best way... but well.. still some things are very much busted.

I wondered the same thing actually. They must have some pretty good researchers because that has to be a hard job tracking down all those legends. Im sure once in a great while they do get a bad lead and end up being wrong about some things.

Yeah, it says that the Amityville Horror is not based on a true story, which it is, mostly on the murder of the DeFeo family in 1974, and the hauntings that have taken place there since

In some cases, Snopes bases it's conclusions on the opinions of "experts", which we all know can be wrong from time to time as well. They are, in general, a pretty good place to find out about some urban myths but horrible where others are concerned.