In source criticism, circular reporting or false confirmation is a situation where a piece of information appears to come from multiple independent sources, but in fact is coming from only one source.[1][2] In most cases, the problem happens mistakenly through sloppy intelligence gathering practices, but in a few cases, the situation was believed to have been intentionally caused by the original source.[3]
This problem occurs in variety of fields, including intelligence gathering[2], journalism, and scholarly research.
Wikipedia is sometimes criticized for being used as a source of circular reporting.[4] Wikipedia advises all researchers and journalists to be wary of using Wikipedia as a direct source, and instead focus on verifiable information found in an article's cited references.