I mean, as far as credits go, that's getting into one of my areas of expertise. Every week, I write two columns about people in media--one about people who are alive, and one about people who have been dead for at least five years. (
https://www.the-solute.com/tag/celebrate-the-living/ and
https://www.the-solute.com/tag/attention-must-be-paid/ for the curious!) Some of the people I've written about are incredibly important yet have very little information about them available online. Perhaps most relevant to our discussion here is one Bob Cuff. He doesn't have a Wikipedia page; for most of the information I found about him, personally, I relied on an obituary written by his son. I'm reasonably sure his IMDb page is complete, but of course how could I be without a ton of deep research?
Bob Cuff was a matte painter. I wrote about him because of his work on
The Princess Bride, because I was doing a stretch of people both living and dead from
The Princess Bride, but he also worked with Kubrick. And Gilliam. And Olivier. He worked on
The Longest Day and
Masque of the Red Death. He has a staggering list of credentials. He created miniatures, when that was what Kubrick wanted. And if your only reference was Wikipedia, you basically wouldn't know he existed.
What's more, I have no doubt that NASA wasn't going to Hollywood for their documentarians. They did some work with Disney, when Walt was hyping space, but that's about it. It also takes very little research to discover that Bill Gibson was a World War II combat cameraman who, among other things, self-produced a documentary about diving to the
USS Arizona that is on display at the visitor's center there. I'll grant I'm having less luck with Barry Coe, but trying to separate him out from the
Bonanza actor--or possibly proving the
Bonanza actor is the one I'm looking for--is proving difficult. On the other hand, I'm exclusively using Google and am not inclined to put too much effort into it, because it's not my silly theory.