On Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:12:36 -0700 (PDT), arromdee@rahul.net (Ken Arromdee) wrote:

Wikipedia has an article whose name is a mistake, but people claim that the article must be named that anyway because our rules say that we must use the most widely used English name, and the mistake is used more frequently than the correct name. (This happened because the mistake was made by a big English-language publisher, so a lot of people picked it up.)

The fact that some manner of referring to something originated as an error does not inherently prove that it's not currently correct to use that terminology on the grounds that, despite its erroneous origin, it is currently in more widespread use than any alternative usage that is more technically accurate.

One theory (though disputed) as to how the city of Nome, Alaska got its name is that a mapmaker misread an explorer's notes where he had written "? Name" next to a spot on an older map to indicate that he wasn't sure what that point was or ought to be named; this got misread as "Nome" and it stuck as the official name of the place.

Also, our system of numbering years is supposedly based on the years since the birth of Jesus, but this is currently well known to be an incorrect count due to erroneous reasoning about when that date actually was. And, of course, lots of common terms such as "sunrise" and "sunset" are incorrect by current astronomical knowledge; it's the Earth that moves, not the Sun.