Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-04-05/In the news

Wikipedia said to rename street narcotic (and influence UK press)
The UK's Private Eye (issue 1259) reported that a November 2009 edit to the Wikipedia entry for mephedrone, an increasingly popular drug, had resulted in UK newspapers erroneously using "meow" (or "miaow", also "meow meow" or "miaow miaow") as a street name for the drug. The name had been proposed at one time by a now-defunct online seller, owing to the abbreviation MM-CAT for the drug's chemical name 4-methylmethcathinone, but according to a drug expert had never caught on. The Eye also noted that on 17 November the Wikipedia entry had claimed "Mugabe" as a street name (it was among several accumulated unsourced terms removed on 17 November), and on 31 October as "the Chinese" (which remained for an hour).

However, research by Wikipedians found that the crucial unsourced street names passage which included "meow" was removed on 17 November, some days before the UK press ran a number of mephedrone stories using the doubled term "meow meow". On 26 November the doubled term "meow meow" was added, the day after the term was published in the Daily Express, which was the source given. The doubled term "meow meow" rapidly took off, appearing for example in The Sun on 26 November. An earlier story in the Irish edition of the Daily Mirror, on 15 September, had already given "meow" as the street name, some time before it was added to the Wikipedia entry on 2 November. It appears the Eye was jumping to conclusions.

Briefly

 * Wikipedia was mentioned in a UK-published magazine which was published on 1 April. Aeroplane, published by IPC Media had an article on the remotely operated guns of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, and mentioned the Wikipedia article when pointing readers to other sources of info on the aircraft and its systems.
 * A 26 March article in Inside Higher Ed describes a Wikipedia assignment asking students to answer the question "Does Wikipedia Suck?"
 * The WikiProject Wikipedia Saves Public Art was featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education twice recently, in a 4 April article (Scholars Use Wikipedia to Save Public Art From the Dustbin of History) and a 26 March blog post (Wiki Project Sets Out to Document the World's Public Art). The WikiProject's founders – Jgmikulay and RichardMcCoy – and artist Anna Schuleit were quoted.
 * A UK PR agency warns that PR consultants should think twice before using Wikipedia to promote clients
 * On 6 April, The Huffington Post crowned The Funniest Acts Of Wikipedia Vandalism Ever