I don't know you're old enough to remember this (or if you swung in those circles) but 30 years ago if you went to the pub you were swimming in a sea of unverif

I don't know you're old enough to remember this (or if you swung in those circles) but 30 years ago if you went to the pub you were swimming in a sea of unverifiable half-baked facts. If someone asserted, for example, that kangaroos had fighting fangs and you countered with, "no, that's the llamas" the truth could only be found after a hard crawl across time and space to a physical library. It was a vastly imperfect system, but at the end of the day, lack of that answer was harmless and it meant there was something to fill up the conversation. In fact, I'll tell you this with full confidence and politely not google it: The Guiness Book of World Records was created to fill just that niche, because the people who first noticed this phenomenon were working for a beer company.