Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: A question of trust

A fortnightly column on technology and the web

issue 01 January 2011

One of many reasons I love reading about crime on Wikipedia is the marvellous pieces of unintentional comedy you get at the end of an article in the list of internal links. Beneath the entry for the Hay poisoner Herbert Rowse Armstrong, for instance, comes:

Poisoners | People executed by hanging | Executed English people | English people convicted of murder | Alumni of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge

Even finer is the tailpiece to the entry on Fred West:

English rapists | British people convicted of child sexual abuse | People convicted of theft | English serial killers | Parents who killed their children | People who committed suicide in prison custody | People from Herefordshire

Armstrong was hanged in 1922 for the murder of his wife, poisoned with arsenic the solicitor had bought to kill dandelions in his garden.

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