4 ms·
For extra irony, get the fake info into Wikipedia long enough that someone uses it, and then use what they wrote as a source to put it into Wikipedia. (There's
by wlonkly 3y ago
For extra irony, get the fake info into Wikipedia long enough that someone uses it, and then use what they wrote as a source to put it into Wikipedia.
(There's a WP: page about this problem that I think gives it a name, but I can't find it right now.)
Aha, someone else mentioned it in these comments: "citogenesis", and it was indeed Randall Munroe's coining, and the meta page is
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_incidents https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_in...
- ghaff 3y agoAnd it's not just a Wikipedia thing. When I was researching a book a number of years back I found some fairly consistently repeated origin stories which, if you went back to some older books, basically weren't the whole story.
- Fogest 3y agoI've seen this kind of stuff used in some activist style groups as well before. Someone may be trying to push some kind of agenda. While in an argument with someone they link to a Wikipedia article. That Wikipedia articles source ends up linking to the activist groups own site. That site then links to some kind of sketchy or very broad conclusion piece of "research" that is unreproducable. So I feel like Wikipedia's rule don't necessarily make their content any more reliable. It just adds a step if you're looking to push some kind of biased/iffy opinion onto a page.