Urban Legends Reference Pages
Encyclopedia
Snopes.com officially the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is a web site discussing urban legend
Urban legend
An urban legend, urban myth, urban tale, or contemporary legend, is a form of modern folklore consisting of stories that may or may not have been believed by their tellers to be true...

s, Internet rumors, e-mail forwards, and other stories of uncertain or questionable origin. It is a well known resource for validating and debunking such stories in American popular culture, receiving 300,000 visits a day.

Snopes is run by Barbara and David Mikkelson, a California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

 couple who met on the alt.folklore.urban newsgroup
Newsgroup
A usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on...

. The site is organized by topic and includes a message board where stories and pictures of questionable veracity may be posted. The Mikkelsons founded the San Fernando Valley
San Fernando Valley
The San Fernando Valley is an urbanized valley located in the Los Angeles metropolitan area of southern California, United States, defined by the dramatic mountains of the Transverse Ranges circling it...

 Folklore Society and were credited as the owners of the site until 2005.

History

David Mikkelson used the username "snopes" (the name of a family of often unpleasant people in the works of William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...

) in the Usenet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...

 newsgroup alt.folklore.urban. Barbara Hamel was also a prolific poster. The Mikkelsons created the Snopes site in 1995, and later worked on the site full time. A television pilot based on the site, called Snopes: Urban Legends, was completed with American actor Jim Davidson
Jim Davidson (actor)
Jim Davidson is an American actor and model who is best known for his work on the mid-1990s television drama, Pacific Blue...

 as host, but major networks passed on the project.

Main site

Snopes aims to debunk or confirm widely spread urban legends. The site has been referenced by news media and other sites, including CNN
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...

, Fox News Channel
Fox News Channel
Fox News Channel , often called Fox News, is a cable and satellite television news channel owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of News Corporation...

, MSNBC
MSNBC
MSNBC is a cable news channel based in the United States available in the US, Germany , South Africa, the Middle East and Canada...

 and Australia's ABC
ABC Television
ABC Television is a service of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation launched in 1956. As a public broadcasting broadcaster, the ABC provides four non-commercial channels within Australia, and a partially advertising-funded satellite channel overseas....

 on its Media Watch program. Snopes's popular standing is such that some chain e-mail hoaxes claim to have been "checked out on 'Snopes.com'" in an attempt to discourage readers from seeking verification. As of March 2009, the site had approximately 6.2 million visitors per month.

The Mikkelsons have stressed the reference portion of the name Urban Legends Reference Pages, indicating that their intention is not merely to dismiss or confirm misconceptions and rumors but to provide evidence for such debunkings and confirmation as well. Where appropriate, pages are generally marked "undetermined" or "unverifiable" if the Mikkelsons feel there is not enough evidence to either support or disprove a given claim. The Mikkelsons say many of the urban legends are mistakenly attributed because of common problems associated with e-mail signatures.

Lost Legends

In an attempt to demonstrate the perils of over-reliance on authority, the Mikkelsons assembled a series of fabricated urban folklore tales that they term "The Repository of Lost Legends." (The name was chosen for its acronym, T.R.O.L.L., a reference to the early 1990s definition of the word troll, meaning an Internet prank, of which David Mikkelson was a prominent practitioner.)

One fictional legend averred that the children's nursery rhyme
Nursery rhyme
The term nursery rhyme is used for "traditional" poems for young children in Britain and many other countries, but usage only dates from the 19th century and in North America the older ‘Mother Goose Rhymes’ is still often used.-Lullabies:...

 "Sing a Song of Sixpence
Sing a Song of Sixpence
Sing a Song of Sixpence is a well-known English nursery rhyme, perhaps originating in the 18th century. It is also listed in the Roud folk song index as number 13191.-Lyrics:...

" was really a coded reference used by pirates to recruit members. This parodied a real false legend surrounding the supposed connection of "Ring Around the Rosie" to the bubonic plague
Bubonic plague
Plague is a deadly infectious disease that is caused by the enterobacteria Yersinia pestis, named after the French-Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin. Primarily carried by rodents and spread to humans via fleas, the disease is notorious throughout history, due to the unrivaled scale of death...

. Although the creators were sure that no one could believe a tale so ridiculous — and had added a link at the bottom of the page to another page explaining the hoax, and a message with the ratings reading "Note: Any relationship between these ratings and reality is purely coincidental" — eventually the legend was featured as true in an urban legends board game and television show. The television show, Mostly True Stories: Urban Legends Revealed
Mostly True Stories: Urban Legends Revealed
Mostly True Stories: Urban Legends Revealed is a docudrama about urban legends and re-enacting them and researching their credibility. It aired on The Learning Channel from 2002 until 2004. It ran for four seasons. Early episodes were hosted by Natasha Henstridge...

, was shown to have been using information from Snopes when one of Snopes' invented "lost legends" appeared on the program as true.

Reception

Snopes has received praise from folklorist Dr. Jan Harold Brunvand
Jan Harold Brunvand
Jan Harold Brunvand is an American folklorist. A professor emeritus of the University of Utah, he best known for spreading the concept of the urban legend, a form of modern folklore...

, author of a number of books on urban legends and modern folklore, who considers the site so comprehensive as to obviate the necessity for launching one of his own.

In 2007, the Snopes site featured pop-up ad
Pop-up ad
Pop-up ads or pop-ups are a form of online advertising on the World Wide Web intended to attract web traffic or capture email addresses. Pop-ups are generally new web browser windows to display advertisements...

s for the controversial Zango
Zango (company)
Zango, formerly ePIPO, 180solutions and Hotbar, was a software company that provided users access to its partners' videos, games, tools and utilities in exchange for viewing targeted advertising placed on their computers. Zango software is listed as adware by Symantec...

 adware product. Snopes stopped serving the ads in January 2008, after criticism from tech sites, security experts and users.

Snopes receives more complaints of liberal than conservative bias, but insists that it applies the same debunking standards to all political urban legends. FactCheck
FactCheck
FactCheck.org is a non-partisan, nonprofit website that describes itself as a consumer advocate' for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics." It is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University...

 reviewed a sample of Snopes' responses to political rumors regarding George W. Bush
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....

, Sarah Palin
Sarah Palin
Sarah Louise Palin is an American politician, commentator and author. As the Republican Party nominee for Vice President in the 2008 presidential election, she was the first Alaskan on the national ticket of a major party and first Republican woman nominated for the vice-presidency.She was...

 and Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...

, and found them to be free from bias in all cases. FactCheck noted that Barbara Mikkelson was a Canadian citizen (and thus unable to vote in US elections) and David Mikkelson was an independent who was once registered as a Republican. "You’d be hard-pressed to find two more apolitical people," David Mikkelson told them.

See also

  • Urban legend
    Urban legend
    An urban legend, urban myth, urban tale, or contemporary legend, is a form of modern folklore consisting of stories that may or may not have been believed by their tellers to be true...

  • The Straight Dope
  • FactCheck.org
  • The Skeptic's Dictionary
  • MythBusters
    MythBusters
    MythBusters is a science entertainment TV program created and produced by Beyond Television Productions for the Discovery Channel. The series is screened by numerous international broadcasters, including Discovery Channel Australia, Discovery Channel Latin America, Discovery Channel Canada, Quest...

  • List of common misconceptions
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