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Comment by CodyMorley | Hacker News Reader

Dvorak hated that for decades wikipedia had the wrong birth year and refused to let him change it. He wrote at length about how wikipedia is the antithesis of the entire conception of a wiki. He was 80, born in 1946.

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I found very quickly an NYT article from 1993 that listed his date of birth as "April 5, 1952". I don't know if that's the source for the Wikipedia article but that info has been around for a long time, it seems.

It seems a lot of people that read about their bio on wikipedia feel the same way. In fact, it's hard not to be suspicious of those that don't.

This is odd. So you are saying wikipedia kept getting it wrong for a long time but now the announcement has it wrong and wikipedia is correct?

I cannot imagine why you find the statements above odd but compare and contrast:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_C._Dvorak&ol...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Dvorak

Enough scrolling through the edit history and you could determine when wikipedia finally got their shit together on his birthdate.

The odd part is that the announcement used the same erroneous date that Wikipedia used to have. Perhaps someone forgot to refresh their cache for a couple of years.

More likely they wrote the obit several years ago. That's not uncommon.

And didn't bother updating the age in a 2-sentence announcement?

It was changed to '46 today

> He wrote at length about how wikipedia is the antithesis of the entire conception of a wiki.

Do you happen to know where?

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