Citogenesis

Now that other writers have a real source, they repeat the fact

Citogenesis is a natural process which generates facts. Nonsense gets into Wikipedia and stays (we need to add a bit about how Wikipedia gatekeepers only look at changes to an article, and rarely review the whole article), and then finds its way into 'reliable sources'. Wikipedia then uses the reliable sources as a citation for the nonsense.

• Glucojasinogen oct 2007-February 2012. An IP adds some nonsense that is then picked up by two medical journals. Fortunately these are not cited
• Philip Mould. It begins with alterations to the online Wikipedia entry of the art dealer Philip Mould, by some anonymous contributor questioning the importance of “discoveries” and suggesting other dealers had made far more important finds. Then, in October 2009, the same person sent a “press release” to national newspapers, falsely claiming Mould was having an affair with Charlotte Barton, a 42-year-old artist. The slanderous allegations were now in the tabloid press, and Wikipedia could now substantiate the same unsourced allegations with 'reliable sources'.
• Cubic polynomials William Connolley corrects the absurd claim that Sharaf al-Din al-Tusi was the first to discover the derivative of cubic polynomials, but is immediately challenged by another Wikipedia editor, who says the claim is in the Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. The problem is that the Encyclopedia had itself used Wikipedia as a source.
• Van Allen belt and volcanic activity A strange edit made in November 2002 claims that the Van Allen belt is the result of volcanic activity. Which is of course nonsense. The editor Googled for this and got plenty of hits, and it nearly went unchallenged. However, suspecting that the age of the Wikipedia entry had caused this claim to become accepted fact, he emailed the scientist, who confirmed it was nonsense, and the edit was finally reverted on 18 February 2011.
• Hair straightening/Erica Feldman/Ian Gutgold - originally inserted into the Wikipedia article hair iron as a joke in 2006/07 by schoolchildren, they have now begun to appear in actual reference works. Original appearances: [1][2][3] Further appearances: [4][5]
• The Axemen WO Sat Feb 01, 2014 4:16 am . "There is a band called the Axemen who formed in 1983. in 2007 someone, presumably a band member, created a wiki entry stating they formed two years earlier so as to link the band's formation with an anti-apartheid protest (a major event in this country's history [6]). From then on nearly every media outlet and blogger repeated their creation myth with 1981 rather than 1983. It gave them something slightly more interesting to write about it, thus fueling the Axemen's notoriety. Six years later there are now a vast number of citations for the 1981 founding (but all date after the first Wikipedia article appeared), so yesterday the Guardian printed it as fact. Is this a case of the Guardian writer slipping up, or is Wikipedia-sourced misinformation just too difficult to spot?"
  • See also Hoax_articles#The Axemen.

Wikipedia: re-writing history

Wikipedia: re-writing history by Andreas Kolbe, WO October 12th, 2014.

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. Thanks to the detective work of Ben Koo at sports blog Awful Announcing, the world now knows (again!) that Joe Streater had no involvement in the affair. He couldn’t have, because he didn’t even play for the team in the 1978–79 season.

At first, Koo was incredulous. How could this be? Streater was mentioned in Wikipedia and so many other articles on the web. But the player’s personal testimony could not be discounted: he’d been there. So Koo decided to investigate. He checked the Boston College Men’s Basketball Guide. Sure enough, Streater was only listed as a player in the 1977–78 season. The 1981 Sports Illustrated article that first broke the story did not mention Streater. Contemporaneous news clippings confirmed: Streater took part in only 11 games in the 1977–78 season, and after that never played for the team again. And finally it dawned on Koo: the reason Streater was mentioned in Wikipedia and in every other article he had read was – because it was in Wikipedia.

See also 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.

See also

• Hoax articles (particularly Hoax_articles#Bicholim_conflict)
• Circular plagiarism