You're reading an article about climate policy, vaccine safety, or economic trends. The author quotes "Dr. Richard Thornwell, Senior Fellow at the Institute for American Progress Research." Sounds impressive, right? The title, the institution, the gravitas—it all signals expertise. But here's the uncomfortable truth: creating a fake expert with a fancy-sounding title takes about thirty seconds.

The good news? Verifying whether that expert is real takes about sixty seconds. The Wikipedia Test isn't just about checking Wikipedia—it's a quick verification method that separates genuine authorities from manufactured credibility. Once you learn this skill, you'll never look at quoted experts the same way again.

Real experts are messy online. They have publication histories stretching back years, conference appearances, interviews with multiple outlets, maybe some embarrassing photos from a 2009 departmental holiday party. They exist across platforms in ways that can't be faked overnight. Their LinkedIn shows career progression. Their Google Scholar profile reveals actual peer-reviewed work. They've been quoted in various contexts by different journalists over time.

Fake experts, by contrast, have suspiciously clean digital trails—or almost none at all. Search for them and you might find only the article you're currently reading, plus maybe a sparse professional bio page. No academic profile. No history of being cited by other journalists. No YouTube videos of them presenting at conferences. It's like they materialized fully formed just to comment on this one controversial topic.

The test is simple: Google the expert's name in quotes, along with their claimed field. A real epidemiologist named Dr. Sarah Chen will generate dozens of results across years—university pages, research papers, news interviews, maybe a podcast appearance. A fabricated expert produces either nothing or a suspicious cluster of results all pointing back to the same small network of websites.

Takeaway

Before trusting a quoted expert, spend sixty seconds searching their name in quotes plus their field. Genuine authorities leave years of digital breadcrumbs; fake ones appear from nowhere.

"The Center for American Health Freedom" sounds legitimate. So does "The Institute for Economic Truth" or "The Foundation for Scientific Integrity." These names follow a formula: [The] + [Patriotic/Positive Word] + [Important-Sounding Noun] + [Values Word]. They're designed to trigger automatic credibility. But many are what journalists call "phantom think tanks"—organizations that exist primarily as letterheads to launder fringe opinions into mainstream-sounding expertise.

Wikipedia becomes your first checkpoint here. Legitimate major think tanks—Brookings, RAND, the Cato Institute, the Economic Policy Institute—have substantial Wikipedia entries with founding dates, leadership histories, funding sources, and documented policy influence. They have physical addresses you can verify. Their staff members have other institutional affiliations and histories.

For organizations without Wikipedia pages, check whether they have a physical address (and whether that address is a real office or a PO box), whether their leadership has verifiable credentials elsewhere, and how long their domain has been registered. A think tank founded in 2019 that only publishes on one narrow topic and whose "fellows" can't be found anywhere else? That's a red flag factory.

Takeaway

When an article cites an impressive-sounding organization, check if it has a Wikipedia page with detailed history, leadership, and funding information. Legitimate institutions leave substantial public records; phantom ones leave almost none.

Academia and legitimate expertise work through networks. Real researchers cite each other's work. They appear on panels together. They disagree publicly at conferences. They build on—or critique—each other's findings. This creates a web of interconnected references that's nearly impossible to fake.

When you encounter a claimed expert, check whether other established experts in the field acknowledge them. Has Dr. Thornwell been cited by researchers at actual universities? Do recognized scholars in his claimed specialty know who he is? A genuine expert in vaccine immunology will appear in the citation networks of other immunologists. A fake one exists in isolation—an island of supposed expertise that no one in the actual field seems to have heard of.

The practical application: search for the expert's name along with the names of recognized leaders in their claimed field. Search for their supposed publications on Google Scholar. If a "leading researcher" has never been cited by anyone at a major university, never published in a peer-reviewed journal, and is unknown to actual practitioners in the field, their expertise exists only in the imagination of whoever invented them.

Takeaway

Legitimate experts exist within networks of mutual citation and recognition. If no established scholars in a field acknowledge someone claiming expertise in that field, treat their credentials with serious skepticism.

The Wikipedia Test won't catch every deception, but it catches most of them—because manufacturing a convincing expert with decades of verifiable history is hard. Most misinformation peddlers rely on readers not checking. They count on impressive titles doing the persuasion work.

You now have a sixty-second verification habit that defeats this strategy. Real expertise leaves traces. Fake expertise hopes you won't look. Start looking.