
How a Raccoon Became an Aardvark - jrochkind1
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/05/how-a-raccoon-became-an-aardvark.html
======
scott_s
The article claims this is an example of a falsehood starting on Wikipedia,
percolating to external sources, then perpetuating on Wikipedia because it's
in those external sources. That's interesting.

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.

~~~
Grae
Actually, the final paragraph of the article directly addresses this point:

"Taxonomically speaking, this is unfortunate. The coati has no more relation
to an aardvark than to any other vertebrate, so the name is misleading. But
language, unlike taxonomy, is particularly susceptible to Wikiality. The
nickname began because Breves wanted to retroactively prove that he had seen
some kind of aardvark at Iguazu Falls. He was more successful than he ever
could have imagined. Search YouTube for “coatis at Iguaçu Falls,” and you’ll
get an amateur video, posted by someone Breves has never met, titled “Coati -
(Brazilian aardvark) at Iguaçu Falls, Argentina.” Breves made his own reality,
and, thanks to Wikipedia, we’ve all accepted it."

~~~
Pxtl
Pedantic clarification: Argentina spells it "Iguazú" not "Iguaçu", since
you're talking about the Argentine side of the falls. Spanish vs. Portuguese.

------
acqq
In the German Wikipedia in 2009 one joker added "Wilhelm" inside of the name
of the politician Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz
Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg.

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-...](http://www.bildblog.de/5704/wie-ich-freiherr-von-guttenberg-
zu-wilhelm-machte/)

------
bediger4000
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
Internet. Too bad it's so late in the process of demolishing old line,
mainstream media, and that it's so level-headed. We could use some Moral Panic
to leaven the day.

~~~
acdha
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 deliberate attempts to subvert
it for amusement, political or religious reasons, etc. You can verify an
article for correctness – itself an uncommon and involved process – and link
to it, only to have someone introduce an error by the time your reader visits
the page.

It's almost certainly still the case that Wikipedia gets corrected faster than
the older review processes but it's not clear that the error rates are as
dramatically different as you suggest or that the future for Wikipedia is as
uniformly rosy as you assume. Wikipedia might continue to improve or it might
fall apart as the hostile culture continues to scare away editors at the same
time as it comes under increasingly sophisticated attacks. Subject matter
experts often have conflicting time demands and aren't paid to improve
Wikipedia while marketers, political operatives, etc. actually can make it
their official job.

~~~
huskyr
Note that you can permalink to every version of a Wikipedia article using the
history tab, e.g. the first version of the Hacker News article [1].

There's also flagged revisions which allows users to 'flag' a revision as the
'accepted' version [2].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hacker_News&oldid...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hacker_News&oldid=286705401)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes)

~~~
chinpokomon
This mechanism actually sounds like it could solve this problem. By making it
policy that citations used in periodicals must link to these versioned pages,
there is at least a traceable record about when something cited incorrect
information.

I could also see this being a service to inform authors when their citations
have been invalidated. A truthiness score of an article or blog post could be
based on citation accuracy and could be assessed by a third party that
specializes in fact checking, but initially it could be done by measuring when
a particular like in a Wikipedia article has changed and whether or not that
change affects the meaning.

~~~
vertex-four
Wikipedia has a page explaining how to cite Wikipedia according to various
styles[0]. Additionally, when clicking "cite this page" in the sidebar of an
article, all links use oldid= fields. (MLA citation is an outlier, as it
doesn't link to anything.)

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia)

------
jboynyc
I once edited the Wikipedia entry for "boma" to add that the word (which in
much of Anglophone East Africa denotes the seat of a district administration)
derives from the acronym British Overseas Management Administration. I did so
after having seen this acronym listed in numerous government and NGO-issued
reports in Malawi, so theoretically I'd have been able to add citations to
back me up.

It turned out that this etymology is a popular myth believed by foreigners
traveling in the region, some of whom must have acted as consultants for local
government and civil society organizations and written their "knowledge" into
official publications in this capacity. Nobody edited their dead tree reports
to rectify their fallacy, but on Wikipedia somebody jumped in:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boma_(enclosure)#Etymology_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boma_\(enclosure\)#Etymology_and_acronym_debunking)

------
jamesbrownuhh
It certainly exposes a flaw in Wikipedia, but perhaps not the expected one.
Namely, it's not so much that anyone can edit the encyclopaedia and introduce
false information, but that Wikipedia's faith in "Reliable Sources" like
newspapers, magazines, and other forms of big media, is so entirely misplaced.

Evidently you can't trust "proper journalism" to actually be true or correct,
since many/most articles are written by untrained, unskilled, or uninterested
staffers blindly re-writing whatever they can find on Google. And that is
perhaps the most concerning aspect of all.

~~~
deciplex
The flaw isn't so much that they trust those sources, because then which
sources can they trust at all? The problem is that they treat all sources
equally, and that once a few non-reputable sources cite something as fact, it
will be hard to remove the entry from Wikipedia even if a few other, more
reputable sources, gainsay the same. The 'rules' of Wikipedia are such that if
you can get some consensus, even if that consensus is among a minority of
disreputable sources, then you have a claim to the truth even if the entire
world outside that consensus loudly proclaims the opposite.

And, if some idiot Wikipedia admin (but perhaps I'm repeating myself here)
decides to stake his reputation on this falsehood, _you are fucked_. The
falsehood may as well be written in stone at that point, as far as Wikipedia
is concerned (cf Jimmy Wales birthday).

------
spain
Obligatory: Citogenesis XKCD [http://xkcd.com/978/](http://xkcd.com/978/)

~~~
bitJericho
Ladies and dudes, there's a solution:

[http://www.everytopicintheuniverseexceptchickens.com/](http://www.everytopicintheuniverseexceptchickens.com/)

------
dtech
I'm not familiar with the Wikipedia cite policy, but wouldn't this problem be
relatively easy to solve by requiring citations from _before_ the fact was
added?

Granted, there might be some edge cases (like when a Wikipedian was very fast
in adding the fact after it became known) but that would seem to stop the
feedback loop dead in its tracks.

~~~
arjie
Wouldn't work. You'd need to find the first occurrence of the fact on
Wikipedia. One example exploit (though there are others):

1\. On Day Zero, write a falsehood into a Wikipedia article.

2\. Wait for the falsehood to become popular through the process described in
this HN story.

3\. Delete the falsehood while performing other edits.

4\. Wait a few days, making other edits.

5\. Add the falsehood. Citations will all precede the day that the fact is
added.

To detect this, you'd have to scan all past history for the falsehood for the
_first occurrence that precedes all citations_, not an easy task.

If you decide to add a falsehood into a related article, then that complicates
matters further. For instance, I once removed a 'fact' that Indira Gandhi
(once Prime Minister of India) was named Gandhi for PR reasons. This was in an
article on her husband Feroze Gandhi.

~~~
jonnathanson
And it doesn't even need to be that elaborate. Wikipedia can be exploited
recursively, i.e., by making up the same "fact" on two related pages, then
linking to each other. If timed correctly, this can work for quite awhile
before anyone unravels it.

Another tactic is to cite existing external sources as proof of a new "fact."
If an article about, say, bananas has a few citations about the nutritional
content of a banana, you can use one of those existing sources to cite the
"fact" that bananas are descended from potatoes. Editors and bots usually
won't question the authority of an existing source. It can be stretched and
extended, like an umbrella, to vouch for new statements and information.

------
tshtf
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wildebeest&diff=484564451&oldid=484343564)

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](https://www.google.com/search?q=wildebai)

~~~
logicallee
I don't think your final link justifies your claim - those 8,800 results
compare to 441,000 for "wildebeests", 25,700 for "wildebeasts" (a simple
typo), or 9,090 for the totally niche joke wildebeets. (Wild beets)

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.

------
frobozz
> "Taxonomically speaking, this is unfortunate. The coati has no more relation
> to an aardvark than to any other vertebrate,"

Being mammals, surely they are more closely related to aardvarks than they are
to sparrows, carp, asps and axolotls.

Being placental mammals, they are more closely related to aardvarks than they
are to kangaroos.

Looking into it further, Wikipedia claims that they are both Epitherians,
which makes them more closely related to one another than to armadillos.

~~~
CocaKoala
It seems a little funny to cite Wikipedia in a conversation about how
Wikipedia is not always a reliable resource.

------
smithbits
When this happens in dictionaries it's called a "ghost word" and dates back to
the 1800's. Here's the wikipedia page on the topic
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_word](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_word)

------
willvarfar
I once changed facts on wikipedia.

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... :)

~~~
stcredzero
_But my team was cleverer: we were editing wikipedia._

Speaking as a game programmer: The thing about computer moderated games, is
that they foster the idea that, "If the system allows it, it's alright." There
are entire national banking systems that have fallen under such attitudes.

(Sometimes you just have to get real and handle dice and cards on a table
top.)

~~~
willvarfar
We did revert the edits after.

I agree with your "this is why you can't have nice things" sentiment, but
sadly I think the petty and the vandals and the cranks will always do it, and
us techies have to design in protection as default :(

~~~
stcredzero
_" this is why you can't have nice things" sentiment_

This is why _we_ can't have nice things. It's also the solution to the Fermi
paradox. The aliens have been watching.

------
m-app
For the lazy curious, the offending commit:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Coati&diff=2251408...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Coati&diff=225140818&oldid=224679361)

------
Pxtl
How did the guy think they were aardvarkish anyways? I've been to Iguazu. They
behave just like raccoons only even _more_ fearless. From the moment I got
there we thought of them as "daylight raccoons".

------
d23
10 years or so ago, a friend and I created a person with a pretty distinctive
name and started peppering him throughout obscure wikipedia articles. I just
tried googling the name, this article reminding me of it, and sure enough, the
name has spread to many many more sites. I guess I'm now a part of history
(the name was done as an analog of my own).

------
ChuckMcM
I was once asked in a deposition if, in my opinion, was Wikipedia an
authoritative source. Which I replied, "No, it is not." When asked how I came
to that conclusion, I cited the 'birthday incident' and how Wikipedia rigidly
held on to a non-fact as fact given its process. This really annoyed the
opposing counsel who had submitted a number of Wikipedia pages as exhibits in
support of their case.

I could not imagine that someone who was being paid top dollar for their
services wouldn't do their own research. Wikipedia is a great place to get
pointers to where people have found things but other than that, one really has
to be careful acting on or drawing conclusions from the information it
contains on any given day.

------
vanderZwan
I wonder, isn't there some kind of way to measure "effective citations"? In
biology, if you look at population size, there's the population measured in
absolute number of organisms, and the population measured in genetic
diversity[0][1]. For citations I can imagine measuring the number of citations
from primary sources, and everything else just being citations to citations
to... etc, including circular citations.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_size](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_size)

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size)

~~~
tokai
There is a scholarly field occupied with the concept of citation and
reference. It is called bibliometrics. The tl:dr is that citations are a very
complex social phenomenon, which is difficult to describe fully even in the
semi structured confinements of scientific literature. Both technical and,
even more pressing, theoretical developments are needed before measuring
"effective" citations could become anywhere near feasible.

~~~
vanderZwan
Interesting, thank you!

------
TheMagicHorsey
Its not only Wikipedia that is vulnerable to this sort of proliferation of
misinformation. In the developer community there are many myths that become
canon simply because they sound plausible and are repeated often enough.

I am a user of Go, and when I go to Go meetups I often hear people say, Go is
faster than Java, because Go is compiled. This is definitely not the case in
all cases ... and may not even be the case for most cases. But it is repeated
as truth, because programmers think compiled binaries must be faster than
bytecode run through a VM ... it just sounds so plausible. Never mind the real
benchmark numbers.

(I still use Go, even if its slower sometimes, because Java can blow me.)

~~~
chrismcb
That is a completely different phenomena. In your case something sounds
plausible so people repeat it. in the Wikipedia case the phenomena happened
because people essentially quote wikipedia, thus giving wikipedia citations to
back up the fact. Now, if you are believing benchmark numbers...

------
sbirchall
Slightly related and because it has intrigued me since I read the paper I
thought people may find IBMs "History Flow" project interesting?

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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_Flow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_Flow)

------
jmzbond
Interesting to see the authoritative power of Wikipedia and the sometimes lack
of fact-checking from even reputable sources. I wonder to what extent experts
believe (e.g., % of articles?) there may be such errors in Wikipedia, and what
% of them get translated into reality.

Just thinking about how much fact checking I should commit myself to before
now citing anything from the Internet.

------
transfire
And yet I couldn't get the moderators to acknowledge the existence of New
Mexican/South Western Chili.

~~~
bediger4000
This is an ongoing problem. I live in Denver, Colorado, which Wikipedia says
has the most Mexican restaurants per capita of any major metropolitan area.
There's a small chain called "Little Anita's". People argue over whether
there's a New Mexico version of Mexican or not, with respect to Little Anita's
(I'm on the "yes, there is New Mexico Mexican" side). Bring me some
sopapillas!

------
cm2012
To be fair, it's not like the statement "called the Brazilian aardvark" is not
true. If it looks like an Aardvark and someone calls it that, then it is
called the Brazilian Aardvark. There are many species of animals which are
misnamed with regards to their taxonomy.

~~~
acdha
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.

~~~
cm2012
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.

~~~
anon4
Well, I've seen cats, dogs, shoes, streets, articles of clothing and abstracts
concepts being called a "kajigger", but I'm not going to update the Wikipedia
entry on felis catus to say "also known as kajigger". That would just be
kajigger.

------
surge
Relevant Colbert Word of the Day:
[http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/z1aahs/the-word---
wiki...](http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/z1aahs/the-word---wikiality)

------
mistagiggles
The article links to a wikipedia article about the circular reporting
phenomenon, and I'm pleased to see that someone has added "vicious aardvark"
as another name for circular reporting.

Brilliant.

~~~
mistagiggles
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting)
Diff:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Circular_reporting...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Circular_reporting&diff=609388736&oldid=609383693)

------
vidar
Its going to take some time but I think we will figure this out. Within 5-10
years we will have learned to use Wikipedia and similar sources correctly. (I
am an eternal optimist!)

~~~
danesparza
That's what I said in 2004 [citation needed]

------
ForHackernews
Coatis are adorable!
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3dVCdaRkA0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3dVCdaRkA0)

------
siliconc0w
This seems obvious but sources should only be valid if they predate the claim.

------
beefman
How is this different from any other common name? Somebody made it up.

------
nollidge
It seems to me the problem is that people think there even exists such a thing
as an authoritative source.

~~~
leephillips
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?

~~~
r0muald
Not really. According to Wikipedia you are not an authoritative source on
yourself, e.g. Philip Roth <[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/07/philip-
roth-wikiped...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/07/philip-roth-
wikipedia-_n_1865861.html>) and
<[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BLPSPS>](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BLPSPS>)

~~~
leephillips
I know. But Wikipedia's rules about authority only have bearing within their
universe, and no bearing upon what is actually authoritative. Are you really
saying that you are "not really" an authority about what you had for breakfast
because Wikipedia wouldn't allow you to claim to be one?

~~~
PhasmaFelis
IIRC, one of the first public Wikipedia "scandals" involved a guy who was
irate because his Wikipedia entry was wrong and he was told he wasn't allowed
to edit it. Cue much hemming and hawing.

Only the "wrong" was that it included "director" among a long list of
accomplishments, on account of he had directed a film. The guy's beef was that
he didn't like the film and didn't want to be noted for it, and he demanded
sole authority over his own historical record.

Sometimes there are good reasons to not let people edit their own articles.
Sometimes there aren't. But you need some sort of coherent policy.

