This may have been posted here before, but it bears repeating. It highlights the fact that the internet, although a valuable source of information, can just as easily proliferate erroneous “facts”.
It is an amusing story about how a seventeen year old kid, as a joke, made an edit to a Wikipedia page that was subsequently cited as fact in books and articles, including the prestigious National Geographic.
“I don’t necessarily like being wrong about things,” Breves told me. “So, sort of as a joke, I slipped in the ‘also known as the Brazilian aardvark’ and then forgot about it for awhile.”
So how did this case of mistaken mammalian identity come to be? As the New Yorker's Eric Randall reports, the culprit is Wikipedia and it’s less than stringent author credentialing process. An inside joke between two brothers prompted one of them to interpolate this one mundane phrase into the article on coatis: “also known as a Brazilian aardvark.” The edit endured and the seemingly innocuous addition was subsequently picked up by a handful of journalists and even repeated in an academic book on natural history. A befuddling feedback loop ensued: as more print sources adopted the coati’s invented moniker from Wikipedia, Wikipedia in turn cited those sources to verify the coati’s new nickname.
Disproving the idea that coatis are known as “Brazilian aardvarks” might be impossible at this point, not because Wikipedia’s rules make it difficult to cite “a lack of references to ‘Brazilian aardvarks’ in published materials before July 2008” as a source but because it is not technically false. On the Internet, at least, coatis are, in fact, occasionally known as Brazilian aardvarks, and there are numerous references to prove it.
Taxonomically speaking, this is unfortunate. The coati has no more relation to an aardvark than to any other vertebrate, so the name is misleading. But language, unlike taxonomy, is particularly susceptible to Wikiality. The nickname began because Breves wanted to retroactively prove that he had seen some kind of aardvark at Iguazu Falls. He was more successful than he ever could have imagined. Search YouTube for “coatis at Iguaçu Falls,” and you’ll get an amateur video, posted by someone Breves has never met, titled “Coati – (Brazilian aardvark) at Iguaçu Falls, Argentina.” Breves made his own reality, and, thanks to Wikipedia, we’ve all accepted it.
That's deep. And kinda frightening when you stop to think about it.
