In 2011 Randall Munroe in his comic XKCD coined the term citogenesis to describe the creation of "reliable" sources through circular reporting. Wikipedia has been a source of citogenesis over the years, and this list is intended to capture all such instances that we know about.
List of known incidents
- Karl zu Guttenberg incident Wikipedia editor added "Wilhelm" as an 11th name to his full name. Journalists picked it up, and then the "reliable sources" from the journalists were used to argue for its inclusion in the article.[1][2]
- Diffs from German wikipedia: [2]
- Sasha Baron Cohen was an investment banker? Wikipedia editors added fake information that comedian Sasha Baron Cohen worked at the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, a claim which was picked up by news sources and then later added back into the article citing those sources.[3]
- The brazilian aardvark Beginning in 2008, when an arbitrary addition to Coati "also known as....the Brazilian aardvark" by an American student resulted in many subsequently citing and using that unsubstantiated nickname as part of the general consensus, including published articles in The Independent, The Daily Mail, and a book published by the University of Chicago.[4]
- Chicken Korma: A student added 'Azid' to Korma as an alternate name as a joke. It began to appear across the internet, which was eventually used as justification for keeping it as an alternate name.[5]
- Maurice Jarre: When Maurice Jarre died in 2009, a student inserted fake quotes in his Wikipedia biography that were picked up by multiple obituary writers in the mainstream press. "He said his purpose was to show that journalists use Wikipedia as a primary source and to demonstrate the power the internet has over newspaper reporting." The fakes only came to light when the student emailed the publishers, causing widespread coverage.[6]
- History of video game consoles: The Video Games Project, in attempting to create a manageable history of game consoles across several articles, adopted a system based on common groupings of consoles with similar feature sets as a "generation". "Generation" had been a term used by the video game industry (e.g. "8-bit generation", "16-bit generation", "next generation"), albeit at the time, there was no direct counting or numbering of these; furthering this, there was no hard lines for more recent generations of where one generation stopped and the next started, and the project used common sense to maintain reasonable grouping. To that, the VG project adopted the "first generation", "second generation", etc. in naming these separate articles. This naming has since become a standard in the industry with the only traceable origin to Wikipedia's scheme, including used by the IEEE[7] as a standard.
- Invention of QALYs, the Quality-adjusted life year. An article published in the Serbian medical journal Acta facultatis medicae Naissensis stated that "QALY was designed by two experts in the area of health economics in 1956: Christopher Cundell and Carlos McCartney".[8] These individuals - along with a 3rd inventor Toni Morgan (anagram of 'Giant Moron') - were identified on Wikipedia long before the publication of the journal article which was subsequently used as a citation for this claim.[9]
- Invention of the butterfly swimming stroke: credited to a "Jack Stephens" in the Guardian (archive), based on an undiscovered joke edit.[10]
- Glucojasinogen: invented medical term that made its way into several academic papers.[11]
- Founder of the Independent: name of student added as a joke found its way into the Leveson report.[12][13]
- Jar'Edo Wens: fictitious Australian Aboriginal deity (presumably named after a "Jared Owens") that had an almost ten-year tenure in Wikipedia and acquired mentions in (un)learned books.[14]
- Inventor of the hair straightener: credited to Erica Feldman or Ian Gutgold on multiple websites and, for a time, a book, based on vandalism edits to Wikipedia.[15][5]
- Boston College point shaving scandal: For more than six years, Wikipedia named an innocent man, Joe Streater, as a key culprit in the 1978–79 Boston College basketball point shaving scandal. When Ben Koo first investigated the case, he was puzzled by how many web sources mentioned Streater's involvement in the scandal, even though Streater took part in only 11 games in the 1977–78 season, and after that never played for the team again. Koo finally realised that the only reason that Streater was mentioned in Wikipedia and in every other article he had read was – because it was in Wikipedia.[16]
- The Chaneyverse: Series of hoaxes relying in part on circular referencing. Discovered in December 2015 and documented at User:Tokyogirl79/Warren_Chaney.[17]
See also
References
- ^ "False fact on wikipedia proves itself".
- ^ "Medien: "Mich hat überrascht, wie viele den Fehler übernahmen"". Die Zeit. February 13, 2009. Retrieved September 11, 2014.
- ^ "Wikipedia article creates circular references".
- ^ "How a Raccoon Became an Aardvark". New Yorker. 2014-05-19.
- ^ a b ""How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of wikipedia". "Wikipediocracy". 20 July 2014.
- ^ http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/may/04/journalism-obituaries-shane-fitzgerald
- ^ [1]>
- ^ Višnjić, Aleksandar; Veličković, Vladica; Milosavljević, Nataša Šelmić (2011). "QALY ‐ Measure of Cost‐Benefit Analysis of Health Interventions". Acta facultatis medicae Naissensis 28 (4): 195–199.
- ^ Were QALYs invented in 1956? by Dr Panik, The Academic Health Economists' Blog on May 9, 2014
- ^ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/11539958/How-much-can-we-trust-Wikipedia.html
- ^ http://ocham.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/medical-condition-known-as.html
- ^ Allen, Nick. "Wikipedia, the 25-year-old student and the prank that fooled Leveson". The Daily Telegraph.
- ^ http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/levesons-wikipedia-moment-how-internet-research-on-the-independents-history-left-him-red-faced-8372446.html
- ^ Dewey, Caitlin. "The story behind Jar'Edo Wens, the longest-running hoax in Wikipedia history". The Washington Post.
- ^ Michael Harris (7 August 2014). The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection. Penguin Publishing Group. pp. 48–. ISBN 978-0-698-15058-4.
- ^ Guilt by Wikipedia: How Joe Streater Became Falsely Attached To The Boston College Point Shaving Scandal, Ben Koo, Awful Announcing, Oct 9, 2014 11:45.
- ^ Feiburg, Ashley (23 December 2015). "The 10 Best Articles Wikipedia Deleted This Week". Gawker.