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Gratifyingly, The New Yorker Recognizes Wikipedia’s Tendency to Enshrine Untruths

We’ve devoted many posts to documenting untruths about Darwinian evolution and intelligent design on Wikipedia. Recently, for example, it was the myth of Abraham Lincoln’s being “deeply impressed” by Darwin’s Origin of Species. So it’s gratifying to see an article in The New Yorker by Eric Randall reflecting on this insidious dynamic: A whopper appears on Wikipedia. It’s then repeated in the media, which rely on the online encyclopedia to an amazing extent. The facts of its being repeated that way is then cited as a rationale for retaining the lie on Wikipedia, a perfect loop resulting in what Stephen Colbert calls Wikiality.

From “How a Raccoon Became an Aardvark“:

In July of 2008, Dylan Breves, then a seventeen-year-old student from New York City, made a mundane edit to a Wikipedia entry on the coati. The coati, a member of the raccoon family, is "also known as … a Brazilian aardvark," Breves wrote. He did not cite a source for this nickname, and with good reason: he had invented it. He and his brother had spotted several coatis while on a trip to the Igua�u Falls, in Brazil, where they had mistaken them for actual aardvarks.

"I don’t necessarily like being wrong about things," Breves told me. "So, sort of as a joke, I slipped in the ‘also known as the Brazilian aardvark’ and then forgot about it for awhile."

Adding a private gag to a public Wikipedia page is the kind of minor vandalism that regularly takes place on the crowdsourced Web site. When Breves made the change, he assumed that someone would catch the lack of citation and flag his edit for removal.

Over time, though, something strange happened: the nickname caught on. About a year later, Breves searched online for the phrase "Brazilian aardvark." Not only was his edit still on Wikipedia, but his search brought up hundreds of other Web sites about coatis. References to the so-called "Brazilian aardvark" have since appeared in the Independent, the Daily Mail, and even in a book published by the University of Chicago. Breves’s role in all this seems clear: a Google search for "Brazilian aardvark" will return no mentions before Breves made the edit, in July, 2008. The claim that the coati is known as a Brazilian aardvark still remains on its Wikipedia entry, only now it cites a 2010 article in the Telegraph as evidence.

This kind of feedback loop — �an error that appears on Wikipedia then trickles to sources that Wikipedia considers authoritative, which are in turn used as evidence for the original falsehood — is a documented phenomenon. There’s even a Wikipedia article describing it.

This, together with Colbert’s take on the issue, makes it all sound amusing and trivial, though. Unfortunately, when countless people take their information about an ultimate question — the origin and development of life itself — from a source riddled with misinformation, that’s more than a matter of taradiddles.

I’m on Twitter. Find me @d_klinghoffer.

David Klinghoffer

Senior Fellow and Editor, Evolution News
David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and the editor of Evolution News & Science Today, the daily voice of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, reporting on intelligent design, evolution, and the intersection of science and culture. Klinghoffer is also the author of six books, a former senior editor and literary editor at National Review magazine, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Seattle Times, Commentary, and other publications. Born in Santa Monica, California, he graduated from Brown University in 1987 with an A.B. magna cum laude in comparative literature and religious studies. David lives near Seattle, Washington, with his wife and children.

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