The world this wiki

The idea of LLM Wiki applied to a year of the Economist. Have an LLM keep a wiki up-to-date about companies, people & countries while reading through all articles of the economist from Q2 2025 until Q2 2026.

DOsinga/the_world_this_wiki

people|Crude awakening

Ida Tarbell

Ida Tarbell was a journalist whose father was an independent oil producer and refiner. She watched with suspicion as Rockefeller's Standard Oil dominated the petroleum business and her father fell into financial ruin. In 1902 she began publishing a 19-part series exposing Rockefeller's perfidies, including the scheme that had helped ruin her father: colluding with railroads, which carried Standard's oil at big discounts and paid Rockefeller a fee for every barrel of competitors' oil they transported. Her findings were also compiled into a book, which The Economist in 1905 reviewed as "worthy of perusal". By 1911 the Supreme Court ordered the Standard Oil trust to be broken up.

Tarbell was one of the foremost "muckraking" journalists of the era, a label coined disparagingly by Theodore Roosevelt, who cautioned journalists against becoming "the Man with the Muck-rake". Muckraking journalists wore the label with pride.

Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.