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)?
(Score: 1) by NeoNormal on Friday May 23 2014, @02:36PM
I was doing a lot of family history research back in the late '90s and this circular citation phenomenon was rampant. I suppose it still is.
The internet was quite a boon for this type of research, but it quickly became so polluted with bad data that one could spend so much time trying to validate information that the benefits of the internet were basically lost.