A fact from 1972 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts robbery appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 4 September 2017 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
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The artwork linked to in the commons is not the artwork that was stolen.
The actual stolen artwork is specified here at RKD: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/280372
Notice the difference in the bottom right. RKD highlight two similar works, which includes the work specified here.
Barryspearce (talk) 10:20, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I have amended the caption appropriately for now; later I'll swap in the image of the work actually stolen. Daniel Case (talk) 20:01, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The "largest theft" seems dubious or outdated to me. Firstly, this was a robbery and not a theft. Re-evaluations of the value of the artworks in their absence seems rather weak. The more recent Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist, which was a theft (not a robbery), has more recent sourced statements of it being "the most valuable heist". – Reidgreg (talk) 02:50, 26 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Stealing property, whatever the means, is theft. Robbery specifically refers to the kind of theft where it is stolen forcefully from another. All robbery is theft but not all theft is robbery. It doesn't matter if the $500 is taken from the liquor store's till by an employee skimming from the register over several weeks or an armed gang making the clerk take it out all at once right before closing.
"Re-evaluations of the value of the artworks in their absence seems rather weak" Maybe, but that's how the value of all stolen artwork is measured. See the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft (and note that title; it seems like all art theft is theft regardless of the method). Vermeer's The Concert, valued this way like all other stolen artwork, is at $250 million currently the world's most valuable stolen object.
The only cited source for the syrup theft being "the most valuable in Canadian history" is History101, a site that I had never heard of until reading this. They are not listed under WP:RSPS, but their about-us page sounds more like it's aimed at investors than, well, people evaluating its reliability as a source. It talks vaguely of "experts" yet says nothing about how it vets the information it publishes. The page on the syrup theft lists no independent sources.
This is a rather extraordinary claim—in fact, as a superlative, it is IMO the very definition of an extraordinary claim—that requires extraordinary proof, and to me this ain't it.
