Lithium Mines for the Scientifically Illiterate - The Freelance Files MMCCLXXX

smectite vs. illite

One of the staffers was browsing the default newsfeed on her phone while her S.O. binged some Star Wars spinoff when an article about a potential source of lithium caught her eye. Thinking he might be interested in the info, she forwarded the URL to the staff geologist. Once he woke up from his nap, S. G. read the "information" with increasing horror. Oh, sure, freelancer Bob Yirka managed to get a few things right; such as the importance of lithium to the modern economy and the location of the apparent deposit, but as for the rest of "New evidence suggests McDermitt Caldera may be among the largest known lithium reserves in the world" (at phys.org)? Naahhhhhhh.

Crude Oil vs Oil Shale for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCLXV

Oil Shale Extraction

Know this up front: here at AN, we have great respect for those who operate professionally in a language they did not learn from the cradle. On the other hand, we find it incomprehensible that someone would pretend expertise in any discipline while operating in a second (or third) language. That is, unfortunately, often the case with the people who write/wrote for DifferenceBetween.com; an allegedly Australian site populated by south Asian freelancers like "Admin" (apparently "Olivia Dawson," probably a pseudonym). Here's admin's half-witted attempt to explain the "Difference Between Shale oil and Crude oil."

Closets and Sloped Ceilings for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCL

2-by-2s and plywood? No!

Some of the most annoying examples of freelance dumbassery were foisted on the internet under the banner of eHow.com, especially the "how-to" articles written by J-school grads who had never in their tiny little lives actually performed whatever they claimed to be explaining. These paragons of bullshittery have always been easy for people with real knowledge to spot, mostly because the so-called instructions are riddled with incorrect information. Today's example, the HomeSteady.com post "How to Build a Closet Under a Sloped Ceiling" by one Jenn Starr, is no exception. In fact, it might well be the rule. 

Glacial Landscapes for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCXLVII

Continental glacial features

Few habits are more irksome to the staffers here at the Antisocial Network than faking expertise. As someone¹ once said, "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt." Unfortunately, a significant number – feel free to read "significant number" as "all" – of the people who receive our coveted Dumbass of the Day award have done just that, although in print rather than orally. Be that as it may, it's time to trot out another awardee who pretended to know quite a bit about earth science, much to the displeasure of our staff geologist. She's Sciencing.com contributor Lindsey Taylor who, along with reviewer Sylvie Tremblay, M. Sc., tried to pull the wool over the public eye in "How Do Glaciers Change the Landscape?" Sadly, she failed...

Devil's Tower for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCXLII

Devil's Tower

The staff (and fans) of the Antisocial Network have always decried the practice, as employed by many of our DotD nominees, of attempting to reword information one just doesn't understand. A mixture of greed and desperation, however, appears to have caused many an ignorant self-appointed "professional writer" to do just that during the heyday of the content farm. One of the staff was wandering through the content of an online website recently when she came upon a classic example of just that sort of "writing." Here's returning nominee Jason Chavis and his clumsy attempt to explain the "Devil's Tower History" for USAToday.com. The ignorance displayed by Chavis is... well, "towering."

Plate Grooves for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCXLI

shelf with plate groove

It's Monday, and we're in kind of a hurry. Bear with us... Being in a hurry seems to have been  requirement for the freelancers who wrote for eHow.com's content farmers, especially when it comes to facts. Given that repeat offender Nichole Liandi barely topped 200 words for her work (a word we use loosely, mind you) in "How to Put a Plate Groove in a Shelf," it's surprising how little knowledge the young history grad managed to convey to her readers.

String Trimmer Reviews for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCXXXVII

string trimmer

Few writing styles are as likely to give our staffers excruciating headaches as the garbage-filled output of spinning algorithms. To be honest, we thought that with the death of pay-per-click freelance sites like Buublews.com and Helium.com, most of the spinners had retired their algorithms and ridden off into the sunset of whatever foreign lands they call home. Not all have retired their software, however: here's an example from that execrable pile of internet dumbassery called SooperArticles.com, another post from the keyboard of "Lawrence Barnett." This one is entitled – and we kid you now – "Trimmer Line Introduces The New." The new what, we can't tell you... even after reading Barnett's copy.

Diamond Drilling for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCXXXIII

It is said (with good reason) that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing; an adage to which we at the Antisocial Network are inclined to say, "No duh." Perhaps the only thing worse than a little bit of knowledge is no knowledge at all. A disturbing number of people who wrote for content farms, sadly, fell under the second category; yet they were more than happy to share their ignorance with the world for a few bucks. Let us take a look at one such self-appointed wordsmith, returning DotD Felicia Dye. This time out, we'll see what dumbassery Dye managed to pack into the WiseGEEK post "What is Diamond Drilling?" which lives in the niche site AboutMechanics.com.

Subduction for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCXXVII

Continent-continent convergence

Watching amateur freelancers attempt to write about topics on which they're ignorant is never pretty. Pros like, say, Mary Roach, spend months or even years talking through the subject with experts, but the self-appointed "professional writers" who plied their trade at sites like eHow.com and WiseGEEK.com didn't have the luxury of immersion in the topic. Consequently, their work was often rife with error; so much so that around the AN headquarters we call eHow the "mother lode of misinformation. WiseGEEK is little better, as evidenced by the crap job returning DotD S. Mithra did on the AlltheScience.com post, "What is a Subduction Zone?"

Visible Light for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCXXIII

cartoon of photons

A not-so-surprising number of our nominees for DotD are caught by our staffers because of errors in common sense. Take, for instance, the ignoramus who thought a normal human could operate a stationary bicycle at 500 RPM... Ignorance of the topic should be no excuse, but hey: when some website offers to pay you fifteen bucks for 300 words of bullshit, why not pump out as many posts as possible? Whatever the case, much of what we've found at the supposedly more technical websites (Leaf Group's Sciencing.com or WiseGEEK's AlltheScience.com, for instance) has been at least somewhat suspect because of an author's weak comprehension of the topic. You know, like Bill Richards when he tried to explain "How to Convert Photons to Joules" for Sciencing.com.

Methane for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCXXII

Methane molecule

Believe it or not, there was once a television show called "Kids Say the Darnedest Things." That was, of course, before seven-year-olds had their own TikTok feeds and broadcast their darnedest things for their own darned selves. Be that as it may, we're not here to talk about kids: today, at least, we're here to make fun of liberal arts grads who try to explain science online. It didn't take a whole lot of searching to find the dumbassery in "Uses of Methane Natural Gas," which eHowian Christina Hadley barfed up onto eHow and Leaf Group sent to their niche site Sciencing.com.

A Built-In Cabinet for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCXVII

A built-in cabinet

Many's the time that one of the AN amateur woodworkers has come across alleged plans for furniture or cabinetry at the niche sites of eHow.com, plans that were clearly cobbled together by a greedy freelancer. You can recognize them because the so-called plans prove said writers have not only never used them for the project in mind, they clearly have never done any of the work at all. Such is the case of one Katherine Barrington, a repeat offender we caught pretending to know how to construct a "DIY Built-in Linen Cabinet" for the mother site (aka "the mother lode of misinformation"), eHow.

Square Tables from Round for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCXII

round table with apron

Another day, another freelancer pretending to know how to build a table in order to collect ten bucks from the nice people at eHow.com. Will wonders never cease... Rhetorical question: of course they won't! So, once more into the breach: here's today's nominee, a sometime clown who goes by the handle of A.W. Ellison (also known as Bill Ellison), who once visited the dreck known as "How to Convert a Round Table to Square" on eHow. Today, it resides at HomeSteady.com.

Making Table Legs for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCVII

broken table leg

We long ago learned that during the "information age" more than a little of the information you get is... suspect. Kindly note that we aren't talking Russian bot farms pushing fake news (although that's a heckuva problem); no, we're talking about greedy freelancers pretending to know all about a subject they'd never heard of before or telling you "how-to" instructions for something they've never done themselves. Though there are a lot of sources of such misinformation, the site eHow.com has always seemed to be the mother lode of such dross. That's where we found repeat DotD Owen E. Richason IV pretending to know "How to Make Sturdy Table Legs" (it's now at HomeSteady.com). Here's a hint: he didn't.

Diamonds for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCVIII

Diagram of a kimberlite pipe

Anyone who's ever had the chance to watch search queries in real time knows that Google, Alexa, and Siri get asked some pretty doofus questions. Once you get past all the requests for celebrity news and the latest true crime scandal and get down to real questions asked by people who (think they) are real, you notice some strange stuff. A lot of it seems to be about ways to make money without much work. Duh. Besides all of the queries we've found about prospecting for gold or extracting it from household items, we also ran across the rather strange query, "What Type of Soil Are Diamonds Located In?" Even more bizarre, however, is the Sciencing.com post by Deb Lindstrom that purports to "answer" the question. 

Another Dummy with 1099-Misc Instructions - The Freelance Files MMCC

Version of the IRS 1099-MISC warning

Besides the high probability that freelancers writing for the once and future eHhow.com had no idea what they were talking about, there were other common shortcomings of the information (and we use the word loosely there) published on the site. Chief among those was that the contributors, as they were called, had to meet a minimum word count (MWC). In other words, unless the hacks pounded out a couple hundred words on the topic, they wouldn't get paid. The last tie we looked, "You can't do that" is only four words; hence, no stipend. Whether Jonathan Shaffer was dissembling just to get some cash with "How to Print Your Own 1099 Misc Forms" (at BizFluent.com) or he was merely ignorant, we'll never know. That he was wrong, however, is rather obvious.

A Dummy View of Mining Exploration - The Freelance Files MMCLXXXIV

These are not diamonds

One of the staffers was paging through the file of potential DotD nominations the other day looking for a different website (our last four awardees were all from HomeSteady.com. So sue us: it's a target-rich environment!) when she came across the notation "cockamamie!" That caught her interest, and when she visited the website she knew exactly why the word had ben applied. She only needed to read one sentence of the twaddle posted by Esther Ejim to WiseGEEK.com on the question of "What Is Mining Exploration?" before she started choking on her kale chips...

Tool Box Locks for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCLXXXIII

Craftsman toolbox lock

Freelancer twaddle in general irritates the heck out of our staff, but there's almost nothing in the canon of freelance crapola that is more irritating than how-to instructions that are utterly useless to people out there asking the internet for help. Today's nominee, returning DotD Artesia Peluso, committed such a sin when she baldly lied about her "expertise" in approaching the question of "How to Replace a Lock on a Craftsman Toolbox" for HomeSteady.com.

How a Dummy Builds a Foot Locker - The Freelance Files MMCLXXXII

Some of the most horrendous alleged do-it-yourself plans for woodworking projects have slithered off the pages of the former eHow.com... straight onto niche sites (belonging to the same company) the likes of OurPastimes.com and HomeSteady.com. Face it: if you ask some art history major how to build a piece of furniture for storage, chances are pretty good that said art history major lacks even the slightest experience in that particular project. Well, at least the chances look pretty darned good that Madeleine Baber had never tackled "How to Make a Foot Locker" before she barfed up her set of supposed instructions at HomeSteady.com.

Drillstem Tests for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCLXXIX

Does anyone besides us remember the snarky poster that said, "Those of you who think you know everything are annoying to those of us who do"? Well, it's true... Just kidding: the reality is that people who think they can reliably reword anything from Wikipedia are annoying to those of us who know something about the topic at hand, but freelance writers like Malcolm Tatum insist on pretending that they can. We came upon Mal at WiseGEEK niche site AboutMechanics.com, where he pretended to know the answer to the eternal question, "What is a Drill Stem Test?" Heck, the boy didn't even know enough to use term of art: "drillstem."