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BGonline.org Forums
Not so fast, Rich
Posted By: Barry Silliman In Response To: Not so fast, Rich (Chuck Bower)
Date: Tuesday, 16 June 2009, at 12:35 p.m.
Another thing to keep in mind is that wikipedia is not an authoritative source. Anybody can update it.
True story- last year (or maybe the year before- time has been flying for me lately)- during the college football bowl season, I had one of the ESPNs on and Stuart Scott was talking. He is the ESPN reporter that had a severe eye injury while he was participating in training camp drills one year with the New York Jets when working on a segment for ESPN. Evidently he got hit in the eye with the football while trying to catch a pass, and that eye was severely damaged, I believe it never did recover fully.
Anyway, I mentioned this incident to some family and friends who don't follow sports and didn't know about this, so I told them I would prove it and went to Wikipedia.
Well, I was shocked when on Wikipedia it did mention the eye injury but said it was because it was injured when Chad Pennington's semen hit him in his eye!!! I showed it to one person, my adult niece maybe, but the others didn't see it. When I went to the site a few minutes later to confirm to my niece's at-the-time fiance (husband now), because he thought we were putting him on, it was changed back to the truthful cause.
I was dumbfounded and thought I was hallucinating (again). Well, some guys at work showed me how to check the history of wikipedia articles and sure enough we were able to dig up the semen prank update. It had only been out there a few minutes.
The moral is, people can, and do, change Wikipedia in order to win arguments, and it is certainly not an authoritative source in everything!
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