Better than tripling elephants

In a now-infamous July 2006 episode of the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert asked Wikipedia readers to insert the factoid that the population of African elephants had tripled in the past six months. Many did, and Wikipedia's vandal-fighters have been regularly removing the claim ever since.

Last week I was one of a small group of people doing a cleanup of Wikipedia's article on the humpback whale. The humpback whale is, apparently, both difficult to count and recovering quite well from the whaling era. A search for estimates of humpback whale abundance brought up this range of figures:

* National Parks Conservation Association: Worldwide current pop. 5,000 to 7,500, down from a pre-whaling population of 125,000
* American Cetacean Society: Worldwide current pop. 30,000-40,000 at present, or "about 30-35% of the original population."
* Marinebio.org: Worldwide current pop. 60,000, or "about 30-35% of the original population."
* State of Alaska: North Pacific pop. 1,000 - 1,200, or less than 10% of the original population
* National Geographic : North Pacific pop. 10,000 to 25,000.

The article last week gave the 5,000 - 7,500 worldwide figure. Because National Geographic cited a new study which uses the best methods to date, we have so far agreed that the 30,000 - 60,000 range is more likely. I did the honours of raising the global humpback whale population by a factor of ten, in one Wikipedia edit. Truth is stranger than truthiness.