[WikiEN-l] Reverberating self-reinforcing autoregenerative circular sourcing

[Delirium]

wikipedia2006 at 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