Wikipedia:List of citogenesis incidents
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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. It is a superset of the list provided at circular reporting because not all incidents in this list have been reported by the media and thus some of them may be based on original research by editors here.
List of known incidents[edit]
- 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 works at Goldman Sachs? Wikipedia editors add fake information that Sasha Baron Cohen worked at Goldman Sachs, information which is picked up by news sources and then later added back into the article.[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]
- History of video game consoles: The Video Games Project, in attempting to create a manageable history of game consoles across several articls, 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 (eg "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[6] as a standard.
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ "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.
- ^ ""How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of wikipedia". "Wikipediocracy". 20 July 2014.
- ^ [1]>
