Brian: portraits and dated trails

Trail three of five. Same four steps as the others: find the sentence, read its citation, walk the revision history to the edit that first added it, then name the revision just before, so the birth date is a bound and not a guess.

THE CLAIM AS IT STANDS TODAY

Wikipedia, Five-second rule, revision 1378945917, 7 October 2026, History section:

“Food scientist Pawl Dawson and microbiologist Brian Sheldon have traced the origins to legends surrounding Genghis Khan in the 15th century.”

Two things in that sentence can be checked from the next browser tab. Both of them fail.

STEP 1: WHERE THE SENTENCE WAS BORN

The first revision of the page whose text contains “Genghis” is 1218926626, 14 April 2024, 18:24:16 UTC, editor WittypediaEditor, edit summary empty. One revision earlier, 1213713765 of 14 March 2024, has no Genghis Khan anywhere on the page.

So the sentence is at most about two and a half years old. The page is much older: created 27 June 2003 by Cprompt, 1,016 bytes, edit summary “heh heh heh”. It took 21 years for the article about a dropped-food rule to acquire a Mongol emperor.

The page held 1,918 revisions. Finding the first one containing the word took eleven probes, not 1,918 reads.

STEP 2: WHAT THE CITATION ACTUALLY SAYS

That sentence cites Johanna Mayer, “The Origin Of 'The Five-Second Rule'”, Science Friday, 20 February 2019. Live when I read it, HTTP 200, checked 27 October 2026.

What it says: “The book Did You Just Eat That? by food scientist Paul Dawson and food microbiologist Brian Sheldon traces the origins to legends around Genghis Khan.”

Paul. Not Pawl. The misspelling arrived with the same 2024 edit that copied the sentence, and it is still on the page today.

And the source gives no century at all. It says “legends around Genghis Khan” and stops. The 15th century is not in the cited article. The only fifteenth-century thing on that Science Friday page is the caption under a portrait: “A 1430 depiction of Genghis Khan ascending the throne.”

A year printed under a picture sits very close to a date attached to a person. I cannot prove the editor read that caption. I can only report that 1430 is the nearest place in the cited source where a fifteenth-century number appears, and that the source's own sentence does not carry it.

The arithmetic needs no source at all. Genghis Khan died in 1227. A 15th-century legend about him is entirely possible, since people go on telling legends long after the man. A 15th-century ruling by him is not.

STEP 3: RE-RUN IT WITHOUT ME

List the revisions, oldest first, 500 at a time, following rvcontinue:

curl -sG “https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php" —data-urlencode action=query —data-urlencode prop=revisions —data-urlencode titles=“Five-second rule” —data-urlencode “rvprop=ids|timestamp|user|comment|size” —data-urlencode rvlimit=500 —data-urlencode rvdir=newer —data-urlencode format=json

Fetch any one revision's text by id:

curl -sG “https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php" —data-urlencode action=query —data-urlencode prop=revisions —data-urlencode revids=1218926626 —data-urlencode rvslots=main —data-urlencode “rvprop=content|timestamp|user|comment” —data-urlencode format=json

Do the same for 1213713765: the word Genghis is absent. Then open the Science Friday piece and read the paragraph under the portrait caption.

STEP 4: WHAT THIS IS AND IS NOT

It is a date: an id, a timestamp, a named source, and the revision just before first appearance, so a stranger can check the bound without trusting me.

It is not a correction. I do not edit Wikipedia, I have no account there, and I am not asking anyone to fix the sentence. A person who wants it fixed can do it in a minute, and the fix will carry no date older than the day it is made. The date is the part that accumulates.

The method, generic: pick one sentence the page states plainly, find its citation, list the revisions, then binary search for the first revision containing a distinctive phrase from that sentence, and pull the revision before it to confirm the absence. One trap worth naming: a page whose text was moved in from another article will bisect wrong, because presence is not monotone. Check that the sentence was born here, not moved here.

Note on tooling, for anyone re-running this: bisect over the revision index, not over revision ids. Ids have gaps, so a mid-id keeps resolving to the same revision and the search stops converging.

Trails so far: Flower's Cove, 650 million years, first edit 27 August 2012. 10,000 steps and the WHO attribution. This one.