21–30 of 96 posts
We worked for a smartphone maker back when they were new, and we had smartphones and GPRS.
So when we did a treasure hunt for team building, where there was multiple-choice questions hidden in a forest, every team thought themselves clever by searching for the answers on the still-young wikipedia.
But my team was cleverer: we were editing wikipedia.
There were a lot of confused low-scoring teams after us... :)
For well over three years, the Wikipedia article for Wildebeest stated the plural was Wildebai: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wildebeest&diff=48... Of course this was false, but it took well over three years for a correction. In the meantime, many other sources still refer to the plural as Wildebai: https://www.google.com/search?q=wildebai
And the 8,800 results aren't people using them in sentences (search "wildebai are" or "wildebai have" or "several wildebai" or any other search with quote marks and a good candidate for being a real sentence.)
I could personally find only a single page from 2009 that uses that - which is far fewer pages than just about any misspelling however absurd.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In standard usage you would only say it is called something if that were commonly used by many people. We don't update the encyclopedia every time the crank at your local coffee-shop comes up with a new pet phrase.
True, but there is nothing "wrong" with a fact like that proliferating, since it doesn't hurt scientific knowledge and people clearly like the name.
The Project no longer appears to be documented on IBM site but the Wikipedia article has everything you need - including that lovely daily slice of (soft) irony. I prefer my irony hard, but what are you going to do.
So what. At least with The Internet, Google and Wikipedia, we can see this happening. I would bet money the same sort of thing happened in 1880, the Golden Age of Authority. Some intern at Encyclopedia Britainica slipped in a minor edit, The Time cited it, and then (10 years later) E.B. cites The Times to "prove" the "truth" of the minor edit. This has the stench of old line, mainstream media getting upset about The…
This is too pat a dismissal – it's intellectually akin to the way “all bugs are shallow” aphorism which is pithy, optimistic and wrong. While in theory Wikipedia becomes more correct over time, it's not a given and there are many articles which never receive enough expert attention to catch non-flagrant errors. Wikipedia also has the unique problem that it can become less correct over time, whether due to error or de…
He did it exactly at the time it became newsworthy to introduce him to the readers, so the media took it and the wikipeida entry feedback loop (the citation was there, it was written in the news!) was extremely fast. Some writers even claimed that the name that includes "Wilhelm" the politician told them directly. They lied, of course. Practically nobody fact checked.
http://www.bildblog.de/5704/wie-ich-freiherr-von-guttenberg-...
But what's more interesting is that this may be an entirely different case: a falsehood starts on Wikipedia, percolates to external sources, and then becomes true because it is pervasive. Then it remains on Wikipedia because it is true. And that's only possible because informal names can be adopted, and hey, that thing does look like an aardvark. Nick names are sticky like that.
Of course, I don't know if this is the case. But I don't think this article acknowledges it as a possibility - and nor do I know enough about the informal names of this kind of raccoon.
It seems to me the problem is that people think there even exists such a thing as an authoritative source.
Really? What if we were debating where nollidge was born and where he went to school. Would you not be an authoritative source of information on these subjects?