So many citations on wikipedia are like this, that’s a great example. I remember reading the page on the city of New Delhi a couple of years ago and coming across the claim that most Indian people don’t even realize the city is polluted, or something like that. My first thought was, how the fuck is that possible, obviously people can physically see the pollution and know what a clear non-smoggy day looks like. Struck me as a very odd and most probably extremely racist claim.

The citation for it was a NYT article about pollution in New Delhi and I could not find a single line in it that referenced local people not realizing the city was polluted. No clue at all how they got that claim from the source but it was presented on the page as a verified fact. Can just imagine some western kid doing middle school project on pollution and coming under the assumption that Indians somehow don’t understand the concept.

This is a relatively benign example but I’m sure the more you dig into a lot of this shit the worse it gets.