In June 2014, the earliest version of Wikipedia’s List of citogenesis incidents said:

Randall Munroe in his comic XKCD coined the term of Citogenesis to describe the creation of “reliable” sources through Circular reporting.

This is not cited.¹ How do we know Randall Munroe coined the word?

In the Circular reporting page, Wikiblame finds the first insertion of “citogenesis” in February 2015 and it’s a link to the List of citogenesis incidents. This link presumably is the vector that let the coinage claim spread from the list to the main page in September 2018:

Randall Monroe, in his comic xkcd, coined the term “citogenesis” to describe this phenomenon.[6]

The footnote links to the comic again, still neither an authority on etymology, nor even a source claiming the coinage. Step #1.

Less than a year later, the Citogenesis article gained a source — albeit not on the crucial sentence — that does say Munroe coined the term. The source is a March 2019 Slate article that criticizes lazy journalism:

Relying on Wikipedia as an independent source is simply bad journalistic practice.

Incredibly, the same Slate article paraphrased Wikipedia without citation:

Randall Munroe first coined the term “citogenesis” to describe this type of circular referencing in a popular 2011 comic.

And thus, step #2.

By July, the Slate article made it into the Wikipedia footnote. The comment that accompanied the edit is so perfect, it looks like trolling:

add one of the top google hits for ‘citogenesis’

Now, I don’t actually think this was trolling and it’s unfair even to call it an example of step #3. Not only does the footnote appear in a part of text not directly related to etymology, but the Wikipedia article at the time had lost the coinage claim, when a June 2019 edit made the relevant sentence say only that Randall Munroe “called the phenomenon citogenesis.”

In 2021, Wikipedia took the real step #3, as the coinage claim came back, now moved adjacent to the Slate citation. It’s still not quite framed as Slate being the source, but it’s hard to read another motive into this edit.

Then the cycle broke. The assertion of coinage drifted away from the Slate footnote and somebody noticed the comic didn’t claim originality. Today, Wikipedia’s Citogenesis article says this:

The first recorded use of the term citogenesis to describe this phenomenon was in November 2011, when Randall Munroe used it in an xkcd comic strip. The neologism is attributed as being a homophonic wordplay on ‘cytogenesis’, the formation, development and variation of biological cells.[18]

The footnote now links to Rice Neologisms:

Citogenesis

noun; blending

The process by which facts in wikipedia which are not cited are used in other sources. Subsequently, those sources are used as the wikipedia citation.

The word “citogenesis” sounds exactly like one of the words from which it is derived: cytogenesis, which describes the process of cells growing from other cells. I found it used in a comic strip, so it is intended to be a funny play on words. The creator of the comic was highlighting how unreliable wikipedia is as a source of information and how its use makes other sources less reliable. The concept that is being described is also very specific, so there was not another word for it. This term would probably only be used by people who are familiar with the webcomic XKCD, as it was recently created in one of those comics.

Etymology [or “Explanation”]: Blending of the words citation and cytogenesis

Source: “Citogenesis step #1” http://www.xkcd.com/978/11/16/2011

Last modified: 5 December 2011

If the December 2011 date is accurate, this can’t be quoting Wikipedia, and, though the oldest archive.org copy is from Aug 2014, I think it’s safe enough to assume the date is true and the Rice entry is original work. What is Rice Neologisms? Here’s how it describes itself:

Welcome to the Rice University Neologisms Database, home to approximately 5500 neologisms collected over the years by ENGL215/LING215 students.

You can decide for yourself whether that makes it an authoritative source.

Authoritative or not, I believe it’s correct about the etymology, and so is the Wikipedia article. Although googling books finds the I-spelling, “citogenesis,” as far back as the nineteenth century, in those examples it’s an alternate spelling of “cytogenesis.” Perhaps the deeper truth is that things can be true without an authority saying so.

But is the Rice definition even the right definition? Our anonymous Rice student defined citogenesis narrowly, as circular reporting that originated in Wikipedia and cycled back to Wikipedia. Wikipedia defines citogenesis more broadly, as circular reporting in general, and the definition I had in mind was different still.

How did I get here? I started by searching for a word that means a stronger effect than mere circularity, “Something that becomes true by virtue of repetition.” I vaguely remembered the Brazilian aardvark incident, and though I couldn’t remember that story’s details well enough to find it, I did remember that Xkcd had a word for the process. Had enough people remembered it the way I did, citogenesis would mean what I thought it meant. The woozle tracks, however, led elsewhere, so the wikiality is that citogenesis means any kind of circular reporting, and the word I want is more like hyperstition:

Land coined the term hyperstition…

—Citation needed