Talk:Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

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1927 claim[edit]

I noticed the parade's page now labels 1927 as the year giant balloons were introduced to the parade - they were not introduced until 1928. A simple Google search may lead you to say otherwise, but we have footage of the 1927 parade, with no balloon in site. Newspaper articles from 1927 also make no mention of giant balloons.[1] BuggleJuggle (talk) 14:40, 30 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That was mainly because most of the sources / information came from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Wiki on Fandom, which included the balloon list. While I'd argue it is the best source for information on the parade, it is also not allowed to be used as a source as it could easy be manipulated and thus unreliable. BuggleJuggle (talk) 18:54, 14 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@BuggleJuggle: I absolutely appreciate your desire to get this right, but the approach you've taken here amounts to original research / impermissible synthesis. We can't look at primary sources and conclude, on our own, that an absence of evidence is evidence of absence. On the other hand, we have Grippo, a reasonably detailed secondary source (even if I find it a bit fanboyish in tone), published by a reasonably reliable publisher, which, based on research with Macy's, Goodyear, and other sources, concludes that there were air-inflated balloons in the 1927 parade, complete with photographs that, I suppose, could be mis-dated, but aren't obviously attributable to any other year either. It seems quite plausible that, competing against much larger papier-mâché figures, the ~10-feet air-inflated balloons in '27 just didn't get any press coverage, or, if they did, that that press coverage happens to have not been digitized. (Note that, per Grippo p. 14, Macy's did not make the '27 balloons itself, so there may not have been press releases etc. about them.)

Anyways, I've written something that I hope makes clear the relevance of both '27 (first balloons) and '28 (first giant helium balloons). Let me know what you think. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 14:48, 3 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

When it comes to this 1927 / 1928 rumour, it's not exactly easy for me to determine which is exactly when the balloons were introduced. Two Akron Beacon Journal newspapers from 1947 & 1958 mention 1928; while the earliest siting of 1927 I could find there was in 1954... which is also from the Akron Beacon Journal.

As for the last part, while I do think 1928 should no longer be the year listed, I think that a note indicating that the exact year the balloons debuted is desputed could be added, akin to how the Troubles page handles when it began. BuggleJuggle (talk) 21:51, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Both of those sources say that '28 is when Goodyear started making the balloons, not when the first balloons were used in the parade. So that's consistent with other sources, which don't say that Goodyear made the '27 balloons. I'd be fine with a footnote if there's an actual conflict among sources of equal reliability, but so far I'm not seeing that. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 14:27, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]