Circular reporting, false confirmation, or citogenesis is a situation in source criticism where a piece of information appears to come frommultiple independent sources, but in reality comes from only one source. In many cases, the problem happens mistakenly through sloppy intelligence-gathering practices. However, at other times the situation can be intentionally contrived by the original source as a way of reinforcing the widespread belief in its information. This problem occurs in a variety of fields, including intelligence gathering, journalism, and scholarly research. It is of particular concern in military intelligence because the original source has a higher likelihood of wanting to pass on misinformation, and because the chain of reporting is more prone to being obscured. The case of the 2002 Niger uranium forgeries was a classic instance of circular reporting by intelligence agencies.
Examples involving Wikipedia
is sometimes criticized for being used as a source of circular reporting. Wikipedia advises researchers and journalists to, and instead focus on verifiable information found in an article's cited references. In the following examples, false claims were propagated on Wikipedia and in news sources because of circular reporting. Randall Munroe, in his comic xkcd, called this phenomenon citogenesis.
Wikipedia and The Northern Echo: In January 2014 a statement was anonymously added to the Wikipedia page on UK comedian/broadcaster Dave Gorman stating that "he had taken a career break for a sponsored hitch-hike around the Pacific Rim countries". When this was questioned, an article published at a later date in The Northern Echo, a daily regional newspaper in North East England was cited as evidence. The falsity of the original claim was confirmed by Gorman in an episode of his UK TV show .
Wikipedia on the coati beginning in 2008, when an arbitrary addition by an American student resulted in much subsequent citation and usage of the unsubstantiated nickname as part of the general consensus, including published articles in The Independent, the Daily Express, the Metro, The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and a book published by the University of Chicago, and a scholarly work published by Cambridge University.
