YORKTON, SASKATCHEWAN — The residents of Yorkton weren’t quite sure what to make of a local floral delivery service’s claim that their burg was famous for “wieners, amateur porn and asbestos.”Neither was Saskatchewan Flower Delivery, which did some hasty backpedalling from the embarrassing mistake. According to co-owner Shirlee Bucknall, the college students she hired to design the company’s new website — which also proclaimed 26-percent of Prince Albert’s population obese — engaged in some faulty research before writing what was supposed to be a lovely introduction to the community, not a condemnation of its morals and appetites.
“They were getting a lot of their information from Wikipedia,” Bucknall told Canadian broadcast network CTV Regina.
In its own entry about itself, the online reader-written encyclopedia admits it has been criticized for inaccuracy and a susceptibility to cyber-vandalism.
“We didn’t know until we got a call last week … that [the offending information] was actually on [the website], and we were just absolutely horrified by it,” Bucknall said. “I took it down immediately.”
Yorktown’s mayor was philosophical about the gaffe.
“I guess people have to pay more attention to what they’re putting on the Web,” he told CTV.
