> 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.
I was curious about that so I checked it out a bit. According to the discussion page there, there are many references to the name "fire fox" that predate Mozilla (mainly in Chinese though some people found English citations as well). But the name has been removed from the article anyway due to over-zealous Wikipedia editors (but I repeat myself).
This is exactly what happened to the red panda, where for years the Wikipedia page mentioned "firefox" or "fire fox" as a valid name. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Red_panda&oldid=3... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Red_panda&oldid=1... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Red_panda&oldid=7... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Red_panda&oldid=4...
Given the overlap between Wikipedia editors and proponents of Firefox, there was a strong echo chamber effect.
Thankfully the page has now been fixed.