The Null Device

The perils of Wikipedia

The producers of an independent film have ended up with egg on their face after accidentally using an offensive word for the Catalan language in their DVD subtitle menu. The author of the DVD, not being familiar with the 30 or so languages the subtitles are in, went to Wikipedia to look up the various languages' names for themselves, and just happened to hit the page on Catalan immediately after some vandal had changed the name for the language to be "Polaco", an abusive term for Catalan people (literally meaning, oddly enough, "Polish person"). The Wikipedia page was changed soon afterward, but the author didn't find out about the mistake until the DVDs with the insulting term had been sent out. Oops!

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