T o heir, when I said that nosler designed the ballistic tip, I meant that they designed the ballistic tip, the first polymer insert boat tail bullet with a hollow cavity behind the tip. It was a great improvement over the plain old bronze point in a number of ways. Then they patented the design. Of course there were prior tipped bullets that even went back as far as hollow pointed lead bullets with an iron ball back in the early 1800s. In some ways, you can even say that they cribbed their design from the existing match hollow point, in that the match hollow point used a lighter weight front insert (air) to lengthen and streamline the bullet. No matter what in heck we look at and call a new design or current invention, it has probably been thought of and possibly even produced in some form in past generations. Some might say that the telephone was nothing new as we were already using electrical data lines to run the telegraph. The telephone was an improvement of that design and concept in that diaphragm speakers and carbon resistance microphones allowed conversion of sound to data for use with electrical wires. People can't even agree that marconi "invented" the radio, that he only devised and took to the public a system that exploited a contemporary.
People love to knock on wikipedia, but the information there is far more reliable than people give them credit for. Data for things like cartridge dimensions come from saami. The information is suppose to be sourced in the article, and so doing, the writers offer support for information that they put in the articles.
This isn't stuff put in by teenagers anymore, it is put in by educated and expert people and these same people maintain and lock some parts of the article so that it can't be tampered with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.38_Special
If you look at the .38 special page I doubt that you can find any significant inaccuracies. The informational citations have impeccable pedigree from phil sharpe to massad Ayoob, and data is sourced from organization such as saami, federal, us military manuals and documentation, hodgdon and accurate are some examples. They cite expert's writings like phil sharpe, massad ayoob, frank barnes, trusted sources that have stood the test of time.
Any and every source is questionable when masses of information are compiled, and parts of the whole will always be tinted with bias and inaccuracies, especially soft things like history.
The article about the lowell textile company is accurate and unbiased, if short, but if you look at historians it was sometimes compared to slavery and even worse, such as the coal mining towns and the mining and factory towns where people lived in financial bondage but at least had a roof over their heads and a place to form a community.
Wikipedia is like the glass half full, but far from the cliche'd meaning. Wikipedia has a tablespoon missing from the gallon, but it's the most reliable source for information on multiple subjects available. Hard data is going to have that tablespoon but art, history, biography and other subjects are too fluid and there will always be a level of inaccuracy in any reporting.
Once an author complained that wikipedia had put a false and uncomplimentary entry in his page, and when he asked that it be removed, the moderators for his bio page refused to. Why would they? there were numerous sources for the entry, many of his contemporaries claimed that it was true, but why should they believe a single person who had a vested interest in removing information that scandalized him somewhat? People lie and people forget and they often insist that what they choose to see as truth isn't what others see as truth.
I use wikipedia and then try to confirm things as well as possible if the information is important. Going to the saami site isn't even going to be helpful sometimes, as they don't generally put historical information in such as what ballistics for this round would have been measure at 80 years ago.
Writing these days is sloppy and full of inaccuracy, and information is no more reliable than the person who wrote it, whereas wikipedia is group sourced and group checked.
choose what you want, try to give wikipedia a bit of leeway about an inaccuracy or two in an article when magazine writers take so many liberties with facts that you can't trust them any farther than you can an angry dog.
Years ago I made a statement taken directly from James howe's gunsmithing manual, and it was protested all over the place as inaccurate. Taken directly from historical documents by the designer himself, I feel that my statement was more likely accurate than what the internet experts said. Not one cited proof.
