This sentence showed up yesterday, January 28, 2012, on a blog called Photos That Shook The World. Pia’s 1898 photograph, in fact, fits the theme of the site. Then I read:
Radiocarbon tests date it to the middle ages, however apologists for the shroud believe it is incorrupt – and carbon dating can only date things which decay.
Did I miss something? A victory for faith over science! End of argument. I must admit, however, I have never met an apologists who thinks this. Even so, according to Google, this exact sentence appears 2,820 times on various websites and blogs, some entries going back to 2007. Think the sentence has been repeatedly plagiarized? Some will note that it is permissible to copy exact text with attribution. And Photos That Shook The World does at least link to Wikipedia as an information source. But nowhere, not that I could find, is this claim ever expressed in Wikipedia.
Oh yeah, that’s the internet culture all right. It happens every day on email. I ran a forum for a few years, and people were always posting stuff they got on email. I tried and tried and tried to get them to CHECK IT OUT on Snopes or Urban Legends FIRST, but there’s no way they would do it. It would come in on email, so they’d post it on our forum as a fact. And 100% of those crazy stories were hoaxes. But would they learn? NEVER.
I’m surprised that the mis-information only got copied 2800 times.