Why does Distrowatch state that Red Hat is Fedora based and Fedora is independent when Fedora's history page indicates that's not the case? Am I misunderstanding, or is Distrowatch wrong?
Distrowatch mistake?
distros
These statements are not contradictory, both of them are true. You are either mixing up the names of distros or the definition of the terms involved.You are probably mixing up RH with RHEL. The old days of RedHat and the current lineup of Fedora and Redhat Enterprise Linux are very different.RedHat Enterprise Linux is basically a professionally rehashed version of Fedora with a support contract. CentOS is basically a RHEL copy-cat without the support contract offering.Fedora is independent of any other current distribution. In fact it is one of the leading independent distros. Independent means that it's development is a free-standing operation. Dependent or in Distrowatch's language based  on distros are ones that are only modifications of other distros and are reliant on the other distros work to continue to move forward. An example of a dependent distro would be CentOS, which relies on repackaging stuff from RHEL. RHEL in turn relies on the development work done on Fedora in order to continue. Mint relies on Ubuntu's development process and just layers on their own changes.