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How to Turn a Raccoon into an Aardvark

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

mcgrew writes:

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: 1) by datapharmer on Friday May 23 2014, @02:57PM

    by datapharmer (2702) on Friday May 23 2014, @02:57PM (#46765)

    Isn't the easy fix for this to create a bot to crawl citations and remove any that were published after the date the edit was originally added? Simply put, you can't use something as a source if it was created after the original work. This might not catch 100% of the cases but it would definitely cut down on the problem of poor citations.