H/T:
Small Dead AnimalsFile this one under "journalists are your intellectual betters". In 2009 a couple of college sophomores, enjoying the effects of
Cannabis sativa, decided to make absurd edits to the Wikipedia articles about various authors of children's books. They did this as a form of amusement, the sort of thing that stoned college students would find funny at the moment.
Fast forward 5 years, and one of the former students comes across tweets from the NewYorker.com regarding one of these authors. The tweet quotes their half-baked edit to Wikipedia, which has survived these 5 years without being challenged or removed. Interest piqued, further searching on Google reveals numerous other sources breathlessly quoting the same thing. Not once did any of these journalists or academics recognize the information as fraudulent, or even find it unfounded enough to warrant further checking.
And you know what? This isn't just an isolated example where the smart set got taken in by some otherwise plausible sounding information. These people, who presume themselves qualified to set the narrative and define the bounds of public debate, are forever credulous of "right sounding" misinformation. Let it be a reminder that they're not smarter or more cultured, they just think they are.
http://www.dailydot.com/lol/amelia-bedelia-wikipedia-hoax/It was the kind of ridiculous, vaguely humorous prank stoned college students pull, without any expectation that anyone would ever take it seriously. “I feel like we sort of did it with the intention of seeing how fast it would take to get it taken down” by Wikipedia’s legion of editors, Evan says.
But apparently, it hadn’t been taken down at all. There it was, five and a half years later, being tweeted as fact by relatively well-known members of the New York City media establishment. And a quick search of “Amelia Bedelia Cameroon” proved that Kang and Wikipedia weren’t the only ones taken in by the joke:
The “Amelia Bedelia was a maid in Cameroon” factoid had been cited in a lesson plan by a Taiwanese English professor. It was cited in a book about Jews and Jesus. It was cited in innumerable blog posts and book reports, as well as a piece by blogger Hanny Hernandez, who speculated that Amelia Bedelia’s tendency toward malapropisms was inspired by Parish’s experiences in Cameroon, as “several messages can be misinterpreted between a Cameroonian maid who is serving an American family.” One blogger even speculated that Amelia Bedelia wasn’t a maid, but a slave.
It was cited in the Amelia Bedelia entry on the website TV Tropes and Idioms, and Peggy Parish’s Find-A-Grave page. It was even cited by Mr. Amelia Bedelia himself: Herman Parish, Peggy’s nephew and author of the books after his aunt passed away in 1988, who apparently told a reporter from the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier that his aunt based “the lead character on a French colonial maid in Cameroon.”
I was stunned. How did a joke we made up about Amelia Bedelia while we were stoned get repeated all over the Internet for more than five years, by blogs and reporters and elementary school students and even the author of Amelia Bedelia himself? Did Evan and I inadvertently start a giant Wikipedia hoax about an obscure children’s book author?