Mistaken identity is an occupational hazard for people who are mentioned even fleetingly on the Internet. Still, consider Peter Agree’s shock when he searched the Web for references to his late mother.

“The references I turned up were to ‘Rose Agree, geriatric porn star,’” said Mr. Agree, the editor-in-chief of the University of Pennsylvania Press. “Wikipedia had a biographical entry for this person, and to my horror it fused elements of my mother’s biography, including her having been a librarian on Long Island.”

Mr. Agree’s wife, Kathy Peiss, who headed the history department at Penn, contacted Wikipedia, the self-policing open source encyclopedia, which dutifully removed the entry along with a photograph. But it was too late. The Long Island librarian and the geriatric porn star had been irretrievably conflated. The librarian turned pornographic movie star took on a life of her own.

I just wish I knew how a supposedly respectable operation like the New York Times could get the idea that Wikipedia is "self-policing," unless they're referring to a police department similar to the ones portrayed in, say, Boardwalk Empire, or Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, or a Jim Thompson novel.

I think this one's got legs. I can't imagine that someone like Silver Seren would miss the chance to resurrect that article. 90 year-old porn performer! What's not to like?

Silver Seren likes geriatric female porn stars?

Rose Agree (T-H-L-K-D)

Any admin want to tell us what's hidden in that history?

Wrap it in furry material and I reckon he'd nail anything.

It seem that you would have no qualms about riding the other side of the Granny Train, either...

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=155092262

From just looking at the public deletion logs, apparently this all happened in 2007. There was an AfD, the article was deleted, and has never been recreated.

The NYT gives the impression this was a recent discovery, but nope, this happened 5 years ago.

-Mooby

It was translated into Spanish and Persian
https://fa.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=6401531
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Agree (deleted August 2010)
And then after the English article was deleted, from Spanish to Catalan
https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Agree

And then after the English article was deleted, from Spanish to Catalan
https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Agree

so far Rose is faring pretty well in her AFD on the Farsi wikipedia.

http://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%88%DB%8C%...%AF%D8%B1%DB%8C

(blue checks are keep votes).

I wonder if the guy who first started writing in Farsi was left handed?

No, Farsi was originally carved into rock with a hammer and chisel. If you hold your hammer in your right hand as right handed people do, it is easier to carve from right to left than from left to right.