YOU read these stories or see these stories on television news shows about how children and even teenagers will give away personal information to strangers on the internet. People from ten to ninety have been fooled by Nigerian scams, other get-rich-quick manuevers, phishing attempts, browser hijacks, e-mail attachments, and other criminal and mischievous machinations of hackers and con artists. The admonishment is always the same: don't believe everything you read on the internet unless it is from a reliable source, like the official website of a manufacturer or government entity or network, etc.
(LOL. And even then you can't believe some of them. I mean, politicians speak with forked tongue in any venue.)
Lately there has been a rumor going around that Ganz is going to have a penguin Webkinz. I wouldn't be surprised; since March of the Penguins and Happy Feet, penguins have been bigger than ever. However, there has been no official announcement or nothing like that photo from the trade show.
Then someone got all excited because a photo of a penguin with a Webkinz tab was posted on Wikipedia. If it's on Wikipedia, it has to be true, right? They have people that check the site!
Sadly, Wikipedia is open to anyone who cares to add to it, whether they are telling the truth about it (or telling the truth as they see it) or not. People who are expert in certain subjects certainly will change things if there is an incorrect fact in a Wikipedia article. But there is no big committee overseeing Wikipedia to make sure everything in it is correct. A few months ago there was a big news story about incorrect information about a person that was passed off as true in a Wikipedia article.
It's absolutely frightening how many people will see something in Wikipedia and automatically assume it to be true without checking other sources first.
At the risk of sounding like a wet blanket and a Mommy clone, I had to post a message in the penguin thread about not believing everything in Wikipedia, because I had seen the photo of the so called "Webkinz penguin," and it was actually a Ty (Beanie Babies) penguin with a Webkinz tag grafted on it. I know because I saw the same penguin in Hallmark today.
Some people always have to spoil things for everyone else.
Everything with a Grain of Salt
