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On another name board a couple of days ago someone posted that Andrea had a Hebrew derivation, and that she got that information from Wikipedia. I looked that up, saw the incorrect derivation was indeed there, and joined Wikipedia and removed it. Since then I have checked several other articles that are categorized as "Given names" in Wikipedia. The most amazing error I found was the following paragraph in the article on Ashley:
The origins of the name come from an ancient Anglo-Saxon legend wherein a lovely young woman was kidnapped by an ogre and imprisoned in an ash tree. Over the years, the tree took on the form of the woman. Her name long since forgotten, she is now only remembered as "Ashley". The fabled tree is located in Devonshire, UK.
I almost admire the creative fiction writing skills of whoever wrote the above paragraph, but it is of course complete nonsense. I have removed that paragraph and said why in the "Talk" page about Ashley on Wikipedia.
Many people claim that vandalisms and mistakes like this on Wikipedia are of little consequence because they will be quickly caught and fixed by the regulars on Wikipedia. Well, unfortunately, the geeks who frequent Wikipedia don't know much about names, because the above false legend was originally added to the page about Ashley last October 1, so has been on the site for three and a half months before it was removed.
I know a lot of people on this board say baby name sites "make up" some of their false derivations, when I think that most of them are only lazily repeating past bad guesses as to etymologies. But the above paragraph obviously is something that was invented out of whole cloth, even if we can't be sure the person who posted it was the original creator of the tale. I bet there are people with warped senses of humor out there who are posting such nonsense on Wikipedia all the time, seeing how long it will take for someone to catch it and remove it. This is really scary, because there seems to be a huge segment of the general public out there that goes to Wikipedia first for their information on almost everything these days. As a college professor, I have to constantly tell my students that they can't use Wikipedia as a sole source when they write term papers.
Anyway, let this be a lesson to us all. Never accept what Wikipedia says about the origin of a name unless they have a link to a confirmation from a reputable source!
The origins of the name come from an ancient Anglo-Saxon legend wherein a lovely young woman was kidnapped by an ogre and imprisoned in an ash tree. Over the years, the tree took on the form of the woman. Her name long since forgotten, she is now only remembered as "Ashley". The fabled tree is located in Devonshire, UK.
I almost admire the creative fiction writing skills of whoever wrote the above paragraph, but it is of course complete nonsense. I have removed that paragraph and said why in the "Talk" page about Ashley on Wikipedia.
Many people claim that vandalisms and mistakes like this on Wikipedia are of little consequence because they will be quickly caught and fixed by the regulars on Wikipedia. Well, unfortunately, the geeks who frequent Wikipedia don't know much about names, because the above false legend was originally added to the page about Ashley last October 1, so has been on the site for three and a half months before it was removed.
I know a lot of people on this board say baby name sites "make up" some of their false derivations, when I think that most of them are only lazily repeating past bad guesses as to etymologies. But the above paragraph obviously is something that was invented out of whole cloth, even if we can't be sure the person who posted it was the original creator of the tale. I bet there are people with warped senses of humor out there who are posting such nonsense on Wikipedia all the time, seeing how long it will take for someone to catch it and remove it. This is really scary, because there seems to be a huge segment of the general public out there that goes to Wikipedia first for their information on almost everything these days. As a college professor, I have to constantly tell my students that they can't use Wikipedia as a sole source when they write term papers.
Anyway, let this be a lesson to us all. Never accept what Wikipedia says about the origin of a name unless they have a link to a confirmation from a reputable source!
This message was edited 1/19/2007, 9:29 AM
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