It's a shame; Toni Morgan has made so many great contributions to Wikipedia.

This story came to mind while walking to school this morning and I had to explain a spontaneous LOL to the kid. I told him the half-remembered story of what I called a coatl, a cat-like creature that lives in Madagascar. He is familiar with Wikipedia, though he was surprised to learn that anyone can change articles. I told him pranksters described the animal as a Brazilian anteater, so now when students write papers for school they could include the wrong information.

"It's okay," he told me, "because if the teacher checks it they will see that it's the same, so the kid will get an A+!"

I love Wikipedia because the reader can't forget that it is entirely written by Toni Morgan and friends. (Readers never forget that, right?) Rather than maintaining Britannica and the National Academy of Sciences at an exalted level of reliability, I think we should consider them all a bunch of nonsense-spewing keyboard-mashers until we have reason to do otherwise.

Another healthy practice is to take apparently superficial threats to my worldview seriously. If it's total nonsense, it should be easy to debunk, and if it's not easy to debunk, then...

For example, #49, "The 2014 findings of gravitational waves are actually just dust" turns out to be completely true.