Alternative-Job-2481 t1_ivli91f wrote
When reading a wikipedia article it's important to remember that nearly anyone with enough patience can contribute. Long enough for you or I to read the article and be misinformed.
(I recently found some wildly racist information under the topic of some non-human hominid that said that people from Indonesia had the most genes from that non-human species and even had a picture of some Indonesian children. Some Homo Sapien children. This particular hominid existed over a million years ago, which is ancient in human evolutionary terms - far too old to be relevant to the modern day.)
marmorset t1_ivlnsdt wrote
When my son was in third or fourth grade he had to do a project on trees and one of the sites we were looking at was discussing oak trees and using terms I wasn't familiar with. We went to Wikipedia to see if the information was a little more clear, and someone had written that oak trees were feared by other trees because they were rapists. It was one of those things where you do a double-take, you're not sure you read what you just read.
sennbat t1_ivm0ol8 wrote
Yeah, but uh... for this particular fact its not particularly debatable, we actually have the primary sources.
Alternative-Job-2481 t1_ivpbx4j wrote
Saying it's a work of fiction is stating Plato's intent in creating the story. It's possible it's a work of fiction, or a severe exaggeration, but we're still discovering ancient cities, for example the major northern trading port of Heracleion which sank underwater most likely due to soil liquefaction. Saying Atlantis is a work of fiction is imo a bit bold of a statement.
sennbat t1_ivpja8k wrote
At the very least you recognize it is first found in an explicit work of fiction, right?
Alternative-Job-2481 t1_ivpli65 wrote
>it is first found in an explicit work of fiction
I'm not saying it did or didn't exist, but real, fictional, and somewhere in between places are frequently referenced in works of fiction.
I hate to bring up so obvious an example (but we're reaching the limit of my education) - Homer (or "Homer") frequently narrated obviously fictional stories set in real places. The story being a work of fiction does not mean that Plato didn't base the places in it on real places or places he thought were real.
Anyway I do see your point, we can agree to disagree. I would argue this is far from resolved, and you're clearly skeptical of something kind of far fetched found in an story that had no real requirement for being anything other than entertainment :).
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