Copy a paragraph out of a Wikipedia article, publish it on a low-effort news aggregator, and within a year someone may cite that copy as proof the paragraph is true. Editors have a name for the loop: citogenesis. An unsourced claim leaves the encyclopedia, gets scraped by a site that reprints anything free, and returns dressed as independent confirmation.
A large share of the web runs on this kind of borrowing, more than most people notice. Mirror sites republish Wikipedia wholesale, sometimes with the domain changed and the attribution stripped out. Content farms rewrite an article's opening sentence into a "fact" for a listicle. Local news aggregators paraphrase a company's Wikipedia biography into a staff-written profile, because rewriting free text costs less than reporting. None of these sites checked the claim against reality. They checked it against Wikipedia.
The trap catches communications teams as often as anyone. A company submits a draft with three citations for its founding date, and two of the three turn out to be a blog and a directory listing that both lifted the sentence from an earlier version of the same Wikipedia page. The date looks well sourced. It is sourced to itself, twice removed.
Do not use Wikipedia articles, or content drawn from them, as sources, since this would be circular. This applies to material from Wikipedia mirrors and forks, and to using an article indirectly, through another source that has, in turn, used Wikipedia as its own source.
Reviewers catch the loop by working backward from dates. A source published after the claim first appeared on Wikipedia, or within the same news cycle as the page's creation, earns a second look. So does a domain absent from any editorial masthead, phrasing that echoes the Wikipedia sentence a little too closely, or a "citation" that turns out to be a mirror listed at WP:MIRRORS rather than an independent publisher.
The fix has nothing to do with finding more sources. It means tracing each one back past the point where Wikipedia could have supplied it: a filing dated before the article existed, a profile written by a journalist who did their own reporting, an announcement carrying its own byline and its own reporting trail. A source that merely repeats Wikipedia adds no weight to a claim, however many times it gets copied.
The discipline that follows is unglamorous and worth keeping anyway: read past the footnote to where the fact actually came from, and stop the moment the trail leads back to the article under review.
