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Story / George Clooney lives! Irish-American star is latest victim of internet death hoax / Click here
British heartthrob Robert Pattinson follows in the footsteps of Irish-American George Clooney as the latest celebrity to fall victim to false death claims, inspiring popular Web site Wikipedia to tighten controls on its articles.
Rumors ran wild on the Web recently that the “Twilight” star was dead, and a YouTube tribute video was even posted to bolster the claim. Around the same time, Web sites and Twitter posts also claimed that teen queen Miley Cyrus had died.
Both Pattinson and Cyrus’ Wikipedia pages remained accurate throughout the ordeal, but the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” is saying that in response to these two incidents, they intend to make changes and put a stop to inaccurate celebrity death reports.
"The continual submission of false articles reporting the supposed death of various celebrities has caused Wikipedia to tight its controls on the editing of articles on living people," reports Silicon Republic.
Various celebrities have falsely been reported as deceased on their Wiki pages, and recently, an Irish college student exposed Wikipedia’s inaccuracies and lack of monitoring by posting false quotes on deceased French composer Maurice Jarré’s Wikipedia entry, which ended up being replicated in newspapers worldwide.
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