Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Dann was IST ihr Name? (Then what IS your name?)

The wonderful land of Germany has a new minister of economic affairs; everyone's pretty happy about this because as you may or may not know, Germany is in a recession, as is the rest of the world, and this guy has to fix it. (Well in Germany at least.) His full name is Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. But some funny person decided to edit the Wikipedia artice and add "Wilhelm" into the name.
When Herr von und zu Guttenberg was appointed, many media outlets in Germany wanted to know his full name to satisfy the people's burning desire to know this mans entire name, no matter how long it was. They looked it up on Wikipedia, and there was his name. Or so they thought.

Many reputable sources in Germany, such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Rheinische Post, TAZ, and spiegel.de, reported Mr. von und zu Guttenberg's name as "Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg." They put the story out, and people believed it, and so "proving" that the name on Wikipedia was, infact, correct. They made this name a fact because so many people rely on the media for reliable/accurate information.

Sleep easy, because the mistake was corrected...just know that the media is not infallible. So this serves as a humourous and light example to not believe everything you hear.

Tschüs! =)

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