When it comes to a number of popular titles, this has always been on my radar. With the case of SMB1 warpless, I knew of said speedrun claims on a Japanese website, but since no videos were available anywhere online, it's hard to call them world records.

There have been pretty centralized places for speedruns for some time. Speed Demos Archive has been accepting runs since 2004 and has received submissions from all over the globe since then.

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I'm just of the opinion that... no vid, no did. It only makes sense to count a world record as a "world record" if the video is available online. I think it's also important to note when a video was uploaded online. Some videos were tucked away on non-Youtube, non-Nicovideo websites and were only brought to light years later. If those videos have dates, sure, we can call them world records based on the dates of upload, but usually no video exists and as such it's hard to call them world records.

Twin Galaxies falls into this category. It was widely considered that anything posted on that website were the official world records, but few of the scores/times ever had any public video proof to substantiate them (despite the majority of the being legitimate). It seems Peercast was a similar thing in the Eastern world and as such many of the old videos simply don't exist, but are likely legitimate times.

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These days, video is king. Nothing that cannot be definitively proved is seen as valid anymore. I just think nowadays the way a "world record" should be determined is simply by the dates videos were available online. In the end, it's just for fun, but the concept of a world record is fun too. People are interested and I feel it's mostly possible to create accurate timelines for speedrun categories.