wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
And, guess what: the reporter's source was the Wikipedia article.
I recently found this on a "serious" subject as well. Back in 2003 I wrote an article on [[Sulaiman Abu Ghaith]], an Al Qaeda spokesman. Almost nothing has been reported on him since then. When recently researching to make sure nothing new has turned up, I stumbled across a BBC News "Who's Who in Al Qaeda?" article that seemed to say as much---that his current whereabouts are unknown, and it's unclear whether he's in Iranian custody (as reported in 2003) or even in Iran at all. I almost cited this for the article's last sentence, which says exactly that. The problem---it's the *verbatim* same sentence. The BBC not only got its information from the article I wrote in 2003, but lifted my sentence word for word! (archive.org can verify that the sentence in Wikipedia long predates the BBC's use of it, and it uses an idiosyncratic grammatical construction, so there it's very unlikely to be a coincidence.) Fortunately, the claim that nobody's reported anything on him since 2003 is pretty trivially verifiable, so this source isn't entirely needed, but it's still a bit unnerving that apparently I am now the world authority---indirectly via the BBC via Wikipedia---on Al Qaeda whereabouts.
Details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Sulaiman_Abu_Ghaith