infundibulum

I was reading John Battelle’s The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (good read, by the way), and something caught my attention.

In a footnote to the chapter on the birth of Google, Batelle gives a quote from Wikipedia with the definition of a graph (this definition of a graph , as a matter of fact).

And something occurred to me.

If you quote something from a wiki, using sic in your quotation would be… well, weird.

Because if you’re quoting a wiki, you’re implicitly giving your approval of the content. After all, if you find a mistake that you would otherwise mark as “sic,” you can fix it before you quote it!

So then, you’re actually sort of quoting yourself, right?

I don’t suggest thinking about this sort of thing whilst sober.