Cognitive Distortions
19th July 2022
In June 2018, the book Modern American Extremism and Domestic Terrorism published a false and defamatory statement about a living person, copied from a piece of Wikipedia vandalism. The statement was a fabricated quote about Linda Gottfredson, a psychologist known for her opposition to racial affirmative action policies, which compared her views in this area to Nazism. In an article published in the Critic in October 2020, I reported that an original source for this quote does not exist, and that the vandalism had remained in the Wikipedia biography for nearly two years—long enough for an academic book to repeat the hoax.
This was not an isolated case. Wikipedia hoaxes about topics including recently deceased people, South American wildlife, Middle Eastern cuisine, and hair products have all come to be regarded as “accepted knowledge” if they remained on the site for a sufficient period of time, and in many cases the false information was repeated in reputably published books or newspapers. The influence of Wikipedia hoaxes has also extended to papers published in academic journals. For example, a Wikipedia hoax describing a fictitious medical condition known as “glucojasinogen” went on to be discussed in several medical journals as though it were a real condition.