Wikipedia had to go through a push around that time to excise any references to such books from Wikipedia itself, because some had crept in, mostly by unsuspect

Wikipedia had to go through a push around that time to excise any references to such books from Wikipedia itself, because some had crept in, mostly by unsuspecting users who believed they had found an actual third-party book on an obscure subject, and didn't notice it was suspiciously similar to the Wikipedia article. It defeats the purpose of citing sources, of course, if Wikipedia "bootstraps" its own sources by citing print-outs of previous versions of Wikipedia articles as the source. This does leave a more subtle problem than literal printouts of Wikipedia articles, which is harder to solve. Sometimes journalists and even scholars consult a Wikipedia article for background, and then just repeat something similar uncritically, without independently verifying whether the Wikipedia article is correct. If the Wikipedia article then at some point ends up citing that writing as a source, a hidden reference-loop is created, with Wikipedia effectively "laundering" a self-reference (unintentionally) through a third party repeating something they read on Wikipedia. (Not a phenomenon unique to Wikipedia admittedly.)