The place of birth of Ena Begović

24 February 2023

I stumbled accidentally over a discrepancy regarding the place of birth of the Croatian actress Ena Begović, and noticed that if you ask Google for the place of birth, it answers Trpanj, whereas Wikipedia lists Split. I was curious where Google got Trpanj from.

The original article in English Wikipedia was created in August 2005 by Raoul DMR. The article listed her as a "native of Split", which in September 2005 was turned into "born in Split".

In April 2018, Lole484, a user who gets blocked for sockpuppeting later, adds that she was born in "Trpanj near Split". There is no Trpanj near Split, but there is a Trpanj on Pelješac. Realzing that, they remove the "near Split" part. In 2019, Ivan Ladic - a sockpuppet of Lole484 - adds a reference to the city of birth being Trpanj, Večernji list, a well known Croatian news magazine.

In April 2020, an anonymous editor changes the place of birth back to Split, and adds a reference to the Croatian national encyclopedia. Today, I changed it back to Trpanj, accidentally while not being logged in (thus anonymously), to see what happens, after starting a conversation on the talk page on English and Croatian.

Interestingly, immediately after changing the text, Google shows me the Wikipedia article, with the updated snippet as a source. That is impressive.

If you ask Bing, Bing was saying Split for the last three weeks, whenever I checked. Today, it still kept saying Split, referencing two sources, one of them English Wikipedia, although I had already updated that. Not as fresh. Let's see how long this will stick.

The Croatian article was created in 2006 after the English one already stated Split, and Split was presumably copied over from the English version. Lole484 changed it to Trpanj in May 2018, and was later also blocked on Croatian Wikipedia, for unrelated reasons of vandalism. The same anonymous editor as on English Wikipedia changes it back to Split in April 2020.

Serbian and Serbocroatian started their articles in 2007, Russian in 2012, Ukrainian in 2016, Albanian and Bulgarian in 2017, Egyptian Arabic was created in October 2020. They all had Split from the beginning, presumably copied from English, directly or indirectly.

January 2022, Serbian Wikipedia's opening sentence, which includes the place of birth being Split, receives a reference - but the reference actually states Trpanj.

None of the other language editions had their article started in the 2018-2019 window when English and Croatian stated the place of birth as Trpanj.

The only other Wikipedia language edition that saw a change of the place of birth was the Bosnian. Bosnian Wikipedia started a few months after the Croatian, in 2006 (and thus being the third oldest article), and presumably also just copied from either Croatian or English. Lole484 changed it to Trpanj in April 2018, just like on the other Wikipedias. Here it was reverted the next day, but Lole484's sockpuppet Ivan Ladic reinstated that change in January 2019.