Just when you think you've seen it all. This is the spookiest story I've experienced in Wikipedia so far. And it began just harmless. On April 7, 2006, we received an email in the OTRS queue: (rough translation: We from Planetopia Online are planning an article about wikipedia and among it, about some fake entries on this page. I have seen the article "Schnorchelspinne" (snorkel spider) in the BJAODN archive. AFAIK, this article has been deleted.) The OTRS people made a formal and friendly reply to his comments and questions, trying to explain it and so on. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Avatar/Planetopia On April 10, 2006, a posting appeared on a German BBS: http://www.winfuture-forum.de/index.php?act=ST&f=1&t=69191 wir von Planetopia Online suchen Menschen, die negative Erfahrungen mit Wikipedia gemacht haben. Gesucht werden demnach alle, die dort in irgendeiner Form verleumdet wurden, deren Angaben unberechtigt als falsch gewertet wurden oder die durch falsche Angaben Probleme bekommen haben. Sollte jemand Interesse haben, seinen Fall vor der Kamera zu schildern und uns bei unserem Beitrag zu unterstützen, würde ich mich über eine Email freuen. (rough translation: "we from Planetopia Online are looking for people who made negative experiences with Wikipedia. We are looking therefore for all who were libelled in any way, whose data were unjustified considered wrong or who experienced problems due to wrong information. In case someone has interest in sharing his case in front of a TV camera and in supporting our broadcast, I am thankful for an email") Planetopia is a TV magazine in Germany's private TV station "Sat 1" which has worked hard in getting a certain reputation in the last years. However, the story about Planetopia (google for it, the second hit is "Planetopia lies") preparing an article about made it to the german language blogosphere with the usual kind of response. On April 12, 2006, I was on recentchanges patrol and a friend came across a rather interesting edit: http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gentherapie&diff=15597765&… The article is about Gene therapy and consists maily about the technology itself and 2 gene therapy projects. The edit was adding the following sentence: aus noch ungeklärten Umständen verstorben. (rough translation: On April 12, one of the patients who were successfully treated, died for unknown reasons) The edit came from IP 62.206.89.218. As the edit was without a source and other news sources did not contain this story or anything similar, I decided to revert this edit and asked the IP on his user talk page for a source. There was no reply. As it turns out, the information was (mostly) correct - the patient had died on April 10. The information about the death of this patient was first released to other scientists on a conference 13 days later. A journalist picked it up and it became a public information on April 27. Here is the strange part: The header files from the author from planetopia's email reveal that the email was sent from 62.206.89.218. The IP is some kind of proxy server (mail.mscrm.de) belonging to a company in the city of Mainz which is producing the Sat1 regional news and Planetopia. http://www.mediaservicecenter.de/main.php?page=fernseh_main The story about Wikipedia as an encyclopedia which has scooped even the scientific community for two weeks has now hit the media again: Süddeutsche Zeitung (quality paper from Munich) has a story in today's issue: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/artikel/519/75444/ Medienkrimi in Frankfurt Wer wann was wusste Wie ein Todesfall nach einer Gentherapie zunächst verheimlicht und bei Wikipedia anonym öffentlicht gemacht wurde – für 16 Minuten. Media thriller in Frankfurt Who knew when what How the death after a gene therapy was first kept secret and made public anonymously via Wikipedia - for 16 minutes ---- as there was no other source to confirm it. Even if the information was correct. It is still unknown who exactly made this edit but the link to Planetopia is simply amazing. I think I will pass this file to Scully and Moulder.