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posted by martyb on Friday May 23 2014, @12:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the circular-reasoning dept.

I was amused by a recent story in The New Yorker about the power of Wikipedia and the laziness of newspaper reporters. In a nutshell, a kid visited Brazil in 2008 and saw a species of raccoon that resembled an aardvark. Looking it up on Wikipedia he edited the page about that species of raccoon and added "also known as the Brazilian aardvark." Several British newspapers published something about the "aardvark", which someone else used as a citation on the bogus entry.

So now that species of raccoon is known world-wide as a "Brazilian aardvark" not by biologists, but by everyone else. I found it amusing. Remember, kids, Wikipedia is not a valid citation!

See also: circular reporting, malamanteau, and wikiality. What other examples of this have you encountered? Have you authored any? Which one(s)?

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by GlennC on Friday May 23 2014, @01:34PM

    by GlennC (3656) on Friday May 23 2014, @01:34PM (#46739)

    I recall watching the ESPN2 morning show "Mike and Mike" one morning, and host Mike Greenberg mentioned that his Wikipdeia page was incorrect. The error that he pointed out was that his middle name was incorrect.

    Mr. Greenberg knew about this error for years, but did nothing to correct it. He did this so that he could give a concrete example of Wikipedia's faults to his children.

    The page has since been corrected, or at least his middle name is (allegedly) correct.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Greenberg [wikipedia.org]

    --
    Sorry folks...the world is bigger and more varied than you want it to be. Deal with it.
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 23 2014, @10:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 23 2014, @10:18PM (#46925)

    The NPR quiz show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! [wikipedia.org] had a question that referred to the suit for Gram Parsons [westword.com] made by Nudie [wikipedia.org] and claimed that it had pill *boxes* on it.
    I checked Wikipedia and, sure enough, that's where they had gotten their bogus information.
    Those aren't *boxes*, as anyone who has seen the suit knows; they were pills [staticflickr.com] (together with opium poppies, cannabis leaves, and naked women.

    -- gewg_

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 23 2014, @11:32PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 23 2014, @11:32PM (#46946)

      So... what are the box looking things on the sleeve there?