Rush Limbaugh has at least this much in common with college professors: like them, he has avoided endorsing Wikipedia. As Gawker pointed out, on his radio show last fall the host asserted, "everybody in the world knows you don't believe anything on Wikipedia because anybody can go in there and put anything on that they want to." It turns out that Rush succumbed to the charms of the online encyclopedia this Tuesday, however, as he quoted liberally from an apparently doctored wiki-page about Judge Vinson, a judge on the Federal District Court in Pensacola, Florida, who he described in unflattering terms.

The New York Time's Kevin Sack reports that Rush, "informed his listeners that the judge was an avid hunter and amateur taxidermist who once killed three brown bears and mounted their heads over his courtroom door to 'instill the fear of God into the accused.'" In fact, nearly all the information that he quoted from the Wikipedia page was falsified by "pranksters" who doctored a supposed Pensacola News Journal article which actually does not exist.

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Erik Hayden