Titiangate : Eton old boy David Cameron admonished Gordon Brown during Prime Minister’s Questions for not knowing the date of the Renaissance painter’s death. Unfortunately the date offered by Cameron was wrong. When this became apparent an over-eager Tory apparatchik attempted to make his leader correct by amending Titian’s Wikipedia entry. This rather obvious piece of revisionism backfired and resulted in Cameron’s minor slip being more widely reported.
Senator Edward Kennedy: After the venerable senator had suffered a seizure during President Obama’s inauguration, one rather over-enthusiastic contributor amended Kennedy’s status to "dead". Currently serving his eighth consecutive term in the US Senate, Mr Kennedy is still – at the time of writing – alive.
Vernon Kay: It’s not just elder statesmen that are listed as dead before their time. Vernon Kay, the TV presenter, was listed as having met a watery grave in a yachting accident and was obliged to call dozens of relatives and colleagues to assure them that he was still alive.
Robbie Williams was briefly listed, before Wikipedia enthusiasts excised the somewhat surreal slur, as “eating hamsters for a living in and around Stoke".
In September 2008 the site claimed that the toothsome teenage star Miley Cyrus had died in a car crash on the way to filing of her all-conquering Hannah Montana TV show. Her legions of pink-clad fans were relieved to hear that the report was a hoax.
Relatively unknown in the Britain, John Siegenthaler Snr, a USA Today journalist, acquired an undeserved notoriety in 2005 when he was the victim of one of the longest-running examples of Wikipedia vandalism. For about 132 days the encyclopaedia listed him as having had a hand in the assassination of his former employer, John F Kennedy.
Alan Titchmarsh, the green-fingered TV personality, was dismayed earlier this year to discover that he had written an update of the Kama Sutra. “I wish I knew how to change Wikipedia to make it correct," he said. Reportedly.
The teenage Tony Blair had, it was fleetingly asserted in February 2006, posters of Hitler on his bedroom wall.
The claim that David Beckham kept goal for an 18th-century football team is one of the most-quoted examples of wiki-vandalism, but its sheer silliness meant that it fooled no one.
It isn’t always individuals that are targeted: The village of Denshaw in Greater Manchester fell victim to a Wikipedia contributor with a grudge who wrote that it was "the home to an obese population of sun-starved, sheep-hurling yokels with a brothel for a pub and a lingering tapeworm infection".
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