The Vatican has acknowledged that it used Wikipedia to produce biographies of 22 new cardinals that were sent out to journalists.
The biographies were copied from the Italian version of the user-edited online encyclopedia, word for word in some cases, and without attribution.
One clue was that many new cardinals were described as being “Catholic”.
We should think of this as progress. When the Lefebvrist bishop Richardson was more or less accepted into good standing by the Catholic Church and his holocaust-denying beliefs were uncovered by the press, Vatican officials bleated that they knew nothing about this. It was pointed out in reply that all you had to do was Google the man.
Seems like the reporters that caught them were verifying the information from Wikipedia also. And, plagiarism is so rife on Wikipedia that criticizing someone for copying Wikipedia without attribution is horribly ironic.
Given the amazing number of wikipedia pages that appear to be copied solely from the online Catholic Encyclopedia, this should not surprise!