[rsynnott]

Experienced wikipedia editors are often pretty good at catching this circular sourcing on important articles, but, yeah, it's definitely much more of a problem for more obscure things like the history of toasters.

Years ago I noticed that the article for the mimic octopus said that it mimicked various things, including the "venomous sole" (!) with a citation that looked suspiciously similar to the wikipedia article. Of course, there's no such thing, but if you search the web you can still find articles based on the wikipedia article claiming it (the wikipedia article itself was eventually corrected to the (non-venomous) zebra sole).

[TEP_Kim_Il_Sung]

For over a decade, wikipedia credited some guy with inventing a special type of blimp, based on some ill-researched news article. About a year ago the article was checked and removed, and then that guy actually invented a blimp, but now wikipedia is refusing to reinstate the article.

[teddyh]

Do you have a link to the Wikipedia discussion of the refusal, or even the name of the inventor?

[rsynnott]

I mean, I think imaginary special blimps fit into the same space as non-existent fish; it's exactly the sort of thing that Wikipedia's defense mechanisms don't work for, largely due to lack of interest.

(I do find the concept of a venomous sole fascinating, though. How would that work? Would it _bite_ people? They're seabed-dwelling flatfish!)

[msrenee]

Could have venemous spines on the pectoral fins. If I were going to be a venemous flatfish, that's how I'd roll.

[ghaff]

A few years ago, for a book, I ended up researching the history of steel/tin cans among other things. There were a bunch of online resources, including Wikipedia, that all parroted essentially the same storyline. However, a couple of older books I found suggested the history was actually a fair bit older and which struck me, at any rate, as more likely.

It was a minor point and I wasn't going to dig deeper but it does show how at least (possibly) simplified/incomplete narratives drive out more complicated histories.

[hinkley]

To be fair, nobody has a better venomous sole impression than the mimic octopus.