Last spring my wife and I started a new pastime (for us) of exploring tiny towns in the Spokane area. She takes lots of pictures and then writes up a little travelogue to post on Facebook. We always do a little research on the history of the place, and that is usually straightforward. On our trip to Spangle (documented below) we unearthed a mystery. Wikipedia says the children of the town's founder planted a tree in the center of town and named it "Branchy", and allegedly it is still standing today. Well, naturally we wanted to find Branchy, but there are no signs and it seems nobody in town had even heard of Branchy. So, dear history researchers, does anyone know the history of Spangle? Does Branchy still exist? If so, how would one find him (it)?
Sure enough, the Wikipedia page for the town of Spangle had a brief history of the town, which was mostly about Branchy:
Reader, allow me to tell you of Spangle, Washington. It is a typical rural town in the Palouse country of eastern Washington. It is an agricultural town set in a sea of wheat, it has only a couple of businesses, and it is tiny with a population of 280 souls.
And yet the history of the town is richer than Wikipedia knows. It once had many more businesses, even a hotel. The Spokane County poor farm was there, and the grounds are now a Seventh-Day Adventist school. It is a pleasant little town.
And yet the history of the town is richer than Wikipedia knows. It once had many more businesses, even a hotel. The Spokane County poor farm was there, and the grounds are now a Seventh-Day Adventist school. It is a pleasant little town.
Downtown Spangle via Google Street View
Anyway back to Branchy. One of my graduate mentors, Bill Youngs, liked to say that "a historian needs a fool-proof bullshit detector." And the story of Branchy had mine flashing red. One of the great things about Wikipedia is that you can examine the history of each page and see every edit that has ever been made, and who made it. So I dug into the history and found the originator of the story and that it was definitely fake.
The tale of Branchy was added to the Spangle Wikipedia page on June 16, 2022, and did not appear anywhere on the internet before that. The story was added via an anonymous edit from an IP range that has since been banned from editing any Wikipedia articles. There is no Branchy.
Wikipedia, though, has a long reach. A Google search for the exact phrase "named the tree Branchy" turns up two additional pages with the story, both clearly pulling from Wikipedia.
Anyway, I logged into Wikipedia and deleted the Branchy story, and added a few hurried (but true!) details to the history section:
Wikipedia, though, has a long reach. A Google search for the exact phrase "named the tree Branchy" turns up two additional pages with the story, both clearly pulling from Wikipedia.
Anyway, I logged into Wikipedia and deleted the Branchy story, and added a few hurried (but true!) details to the history section:
The rise and fall of Branchy highlights a problem with Wikipedia, particularly small pages with limited traffic. A survey of other small Washington town's Wikipedia pages reveals no obvious fake stories, but the history sections are almost uniformly a few sentences, focused on the founding of the community.
What we need is a crowdsourcing effort to improve these pages. Who wants to organize it?
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