> That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source.

This happens a lot on Wikipedia. I'm not sure why, but it does and you can see its traces through the Internet as people post the mistaken information around.

One that took me a little work to fix was pointed out by someone on Twitter: https://x.com/Almost_Sure/status/1901112689138536903

When I found the source, the twitter poster was correct! Someone had decided to translate "A hundred years ago, people would have considered this an outrage. But now..." as "this function is an outrage" which honestly is ironically an outrageous translation. What the hell dude.

But it takes a lot of work to clean up stuff like that! https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weierstrass_funct...

I had to go find the actual source (not the other 'sources' that repeated off Wikipedia or each other) and then make sure it was correct before dealing with it. A lie can travel halfway around the world...