Long has Wikipedia battled people just copying and pasting content from other sources into its pages. Also, may academic groups have tried to stop students from copying from Wikipedia into their assignments. Well now a NEW interaction has occured. I was reading
this Reuters (via Daily Telegraph) article about difficulties with Chinese characters in the digital age (pretty funny story actually), when I noted the last two paragraphs of the article.
"The at sign (@, read aloud in English as "at") is a typographic symbol used as an abbreviation for "at" in accounting and commercial invoices, in statements such as "7 widgets @ $2 ea. = $14". More recently, the at symbol has become ubiquitous due to its use in email addresses.
It is often referred to informally as the at symbol, the at sign, or just at. In other languages, the symbol may have a different name (see below). It has the official name commercial at in the ANSI/CCITT/Unicode character encoding standards. However, no formal English term has been officially assigned to this character."
I wanted to learn more, so I dutifully went to Wikipedia to find out what kind of naming the "at" sign DOES have. I didn't expect that I would find the
"at" sign article to begin with the exact same text that the other article ended with:
"The
at sign (@, read aloud in English as "at") is a typographic symbol used as an abbreviation for "at" in
accounting and commercial
invoices, in statements such as "7
widgets @ $2 ea. = $14". More recently, the at symbol has become ubiquitous due to its use in
email addresses.
It is often referred to informally as the at symbol, the at sign, or just at. In other languages, the symbol may have a different name (see below). It has the official name commercial at in the ANSI/CCITT/Unicode character encoding standards. However, no formal English term has been officially assigned to this character."
What a crazy coincidence. Assuming Reuters is the copier (as it would be a weird place for Wikipedia to get its information from), this is a pretty gross citation error on their part. For clarity, I didn't create either of the indented passages...they are simply being cited for their relevance to this article.
References:
Reuters Article (via Daily Telegraph)
Wikipedia At Sign Article