Tuesday, May 13, 2025

Pope Who

Wikipedia doesn't seem to know who the Pope is:
Among the first edits to Prevost’s existing Wikipedia page was to rename it to his papal title, except the user actually renamed the page “Pope Leo XIIV” with an invalid additional numeral. The inaccurate title page saw over a quarter million views during this time. Another editor subsequently added the incorrect title to the infobox at the top of the page. Both mistakes were quickly addressed, but moving the page to the correct title resulted in further errors. One issue was a page already existed on Pope Leo XIV, due to a false Pope having the title. An admin thus executed a “round-robin swap” to move the article to the correct title. However, another editor coming to the page with the false title created an additional article about Pope Leo XIV at the title. What ensued were various editors making changes as if it were the article on the new Pope, with one editor further renaming the page “Pope Leon XIIV” stating the name “Leo” was incorrect. This version saw about 10,000 views. Discussing deletion of the erroneous title pages that now redirected to the correct title, editors insisted these were “implausible” typos. Some acknowledged that it was possible for people to make errors such as adding a duplicate numeral with others noting that “Leon” was simply the Spanish name for Pope Leo XIV without the accent. None seemed to acknowledge the fact that the discussion was only occurring precisely because other established editors had made these “implausible” errors already.
What's implausible is that anyone still sees Wikipedia as reliable...

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