Yes but it's not easy to find random Wikipedia user pages, or even find the specific talk page comment in the archives without knowing what to look for. Go ahead, find a friend, give them no clues, and see if they find it.
I don't know what “investing over” means, but all I can say is (repeating myself): try it with a friend, without giving them the benefit of hindsight.
(Very few visitors to a Wikipedia page read its talk page, very few of them will further look at the archives of the talk page, let alone read every single comment and its corresponding commenter's name, and in this case as soon as the author knew the spelling to look for, the rest was straightforward for them.)
well said svat. without laboring the point, "once you know - you know". until then it is like trying to find a needle in a haystack - and some people do not want to be found.
I mean that the author was literally writing a book about this and literally conducting an investigation about who was the real author of the TIFF spec. He interviewed other people about it, he had a name that had a typo in it, he even found a white-on-white line in a PDF with the real name. He was clearly putting effort into the research.
We are humans, everybody can miss things, I mentioned "hindsight is 20/20" but still, it was in the Wikipedia discussion page for the TIFF article all the time. It's a matter of fact and some random HNer found it in minutes/hours.
I repeat myself, it was probably better that he didn't found that out and went to write a hand-written letter to the alleged author's home address, it created a much deeper human bond, which is especially meaningful since Stephen Carlsen passed away not much later.
"The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story." from the man himself[1]
...but let us not ruin a good story with the truth. Remember why earth was built. The "real" answer might then be flowing in the ether.
Talk pages aren’t valid sources in general. In this case the author is dead and an established expert having published in the field, so I guess it’s fine, but I wouldn’t bet.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210108174645/https://www.adobe...