Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion#The_Onion_taken_seriously

  Reminds me of the case where wikipedia (being a user-edited encyclopedia)
inadvertedly created its own sourced fact.

  In the article of one of those persons with really many names (like eg.
Pablo Picasso, although I think it was not his article), someone added,
probably as a form of vandalism, an additional fake name in there. This
went for a long time unnoticed, and at least some newspapers/magazines
copied this full name (containing the extraneous name) verbatim from
wikipedia.

  At some point someone noticed this extraneous name and demanded for some
references that the person really was named like that. Lo and behold,
references to those newspapers using the name appeared in the article.
Of course the people who added the references didn't know that the
newspaper articles had copied the name from wikipedia.

  So now wikipedia had a referenced fact that it had created itself
(until someone figured this whole thing out).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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