If you’re not familiar with the concept of egosurfing, it involves typing your own name into Google and checking if any of the results relate to you. It seems vain and self-centred, but almost everyone I’ve asked about it admits to it openly so I’m going to just come out and say it - I’m an avid egosurfer. I’ve googled myself on many occasions, although most attempts were pretty unremarkable until the first result for “Eugene Kenny” became my bebo page. I realise it’s not exactly ranking first for John Smith, but it sure rubs my ego the right way.
I also quite like this.
Anyway, that was all just a lead up to telling you the following story. A few days ago, Donal Troddyn googled “Donal Troddyn” and came across something odd: it seems he had published a book, A Treatise on Language Volume Two, without being aware of it. That he managed to write an entire volume, consider there to be still more in the field worth discussing and pen a second tome, all without any aspect of the task leaving his subconscious seemed slightly implausible; but the fact that brainyencyclopedia.com clearly cited him as a reference on their page on ambiguity is pretty strong evidence.
The truth, as it turned out, was slightly more convoluted; Donal had mischievously edited the wikipedia entry on ambiguity years ago, and it was promptly deleted. (Here’s the original edit. It stayed on there for 5 months!) Then brainyencyclopedia.com, despite their implicit abundance of brains, had decided to shamelessly pilfer their content from wikipedia; and they just so happened to do so while the fictional quote was in place. To add to the bedlam even further, several other websites then in turn copied brainyencyclopedia, including one translation into Czech (which I can’t seem to find right now 
).
Donal blogged about the incident here, albeit with slightly more brevity.
Aside from being unfathomably hilarious, this does actually highlight the weakness of wikipedia as a serious source of information; while most vandalism is immediately noticeable, some could easily slip into your presumed collection of facts or a hastily prepared arts essay. I think Tycho of Penny Arcade may have said it best:
“What you’ve proposed is a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn’t exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant f**king mob for my information.”
While I don’t endorse the vandalism of wikipedia, this website seems to make a bizarre sort of sense.
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