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heat Did I miss Something: World's hottest

Capitone

Capitone

I know I've been gone for about a week or so, but it would appear that I've missed something....(or Wikepedia is less reliable than I thought)

Trolling around as I do, I ran across a statement regarding the Bhut to the tune of "a Chili pepper recognized as the 2nd hottest". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naga_Jolokia_pepper

Further reading produced a 2nd link to a pepper I'm sure we've all read about lately: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naga_Viper

I don’t recall any pepper “officially” (and take that with a grain of salt too) knocking the bhut to 2nd just yet. Wondering if I really did miss something.

Observation: They quote the Viper as coming in at 1,359,000, and the Dorset Naga as 1,598,227....I thought I could count before reading these wikis, but I think I'll just say the info listed seems a wee bit....I dunno, off.
 
I agree, the SHU ratings of those chillis were tested at Warwick and even they claim they cannot do accurate tests and they are not official.
The info on wikipedia is indeed a bit off.
 
Capitone said:
(or Wikepedia is less reliable than I thought)
Click to expand...
You do know that Wikipedia is powered by the people, meaning anyone can edit/change/enter an entry, correct? You could edit that entry right now.

Less reliable than you thought? You always need to check facts and sources from Wikipedia. Like I said, it is just people's entries.
 
It's all a ploy for some "special" person to make a buck off of a name. Said name might have even stolen an idea from someone, and won an award for it.
You can't always trust what ya read...
 
Agreed on the misinformation that the internet provides. To me, it's kind of like forecasting the weather. If you get one right out of ten, you are doing pretty well. I always have to remind myself, DO NOT QUOTE WIKIPEDIA!!!!!!
 
Yeah it's complete misinformation as you see from the sources listed on the wiki, they all relate back to the single Warwick test.


Comprehensive overview on the subject by Habanero500 http://www.thehotpepper.com/topic/19137-not-naga-viper-but-genuine-testing/
 
I never knew wiki's were THAT easy to edit. Really takes away from the value I percieved them to have. The 1st paragraph of the bhut article SCREAMED suspect to me though. Granted, I never use any single source when doing serious searches for info, but I honestly didn't know wiki's were this susceptible to manipulation.
 
Born2BurnShow said:
Yeah it's complete misinformation as you see from the sources listed on the wiki, they all relate back to the single Warwick test.


Comprehensive overview on the subject by Habanero500 http://www.thehotpepper.com/topic/19137-not-naga-viper-but-genuine-testing/
Click to expand...

That thread and another on the Viper is the only reason I knew something was off about that wiki. THP rocks!
 
fertilizer said:
I agree, the SHU ratings of those chillis were tested at Warwick and even they claim they cannot do accurate tests and they are not official.
Click to expand...

I don't think Warwick University would ever claim that their own tests were inaccurate. Its just us chile-heads that get very suspicious when every test result seems to be over a million scoville units. I believe Warwick's claim was that they only test what is given to them so they can't guarantee authenticity. OK, here is Warwick's reply

"While we cannot release our full report on this Chilli without the commercial client's express permission, we can say that we feel that any result obtained from the Chilli sample that was tested by us should be viewed as only a good indicator that this Chilli could meet the conditions of entry into the Guinness Book of Records. The sample provided to us was relatively small and, while we do not know explicitly what the Guinness Book of Records testing requirements would be, we would expect that they would require at least one more test with a larger sample and possibly a corroborating test in another lab."
http://www.fiery-foods.com/daves-fiery-front-page/university-of-warwick-response-to-naga-viper-testing.html
 
Wikipedia is accurate the great majority of the time and is extremely valuable, but when it comes to fringe hobbies like this, what do you expect? Tons of supposedly reputable news sites wrote the same BS about the Naga Viper. It's almost impossible to write any kind of scientific article on superhots because there are very, very few scientific articles on them to use as sources. Universities other than NMSU rarely do any research on chiles unless it has to do with breeding disease resistant strains or something, and NMSU does most of their research on the Numex varities. There are a lot of people here who are qualified to write an article on superhots, but what sources are they going to site? As experienced, skilled, and knowledgeable of growers as some of the people here are, they can't really be cited in a encyclopedia article unless they have some type of related scholarly credentials.

The theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku who is on the science channel frequently links to wikipedia pages to explain astrophysics concepts. My organic chemistry teacher often had us look up organic compounds on wikipedia to get information for homework. Look up an article in wikipedia on a chemistry, physics, history, etc. subject and it almost always very accurate and unbiased. I would rather look something up in wikipedia than some crusty old encyclopedia, the information is usually as accurate or more accurate, more complete, and far more up to date. The problem is not really with wikipedia, the problem is the lack of testing and information from credible sources when it comes to superhots and chiles in general. That same information about the Naga Viper is all over the internet except for here and maybe some other chile pepper forums.
 
Just click View History and you can see all the changes and who changed it.
 
Changed again. Looks like we've finally reached a happy medium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naga_Viper

**Edit: Link was changed since posting...adding new link**
 
My main problem with the article is that it claims that the Naga Viper will be featured in the Guinness Book of World Records, sources 1 and 3 are cited right after this, yet neither of these two sources mentions anything at all about the Guiness Book of World Records. I've never read anything that has stated that either. Someone needs to remove that part unless there's a source for that info, or at least add a "source needed" tag to that claim.
 
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