If you're looking for Sinbad on Wikipedia, try looking in categories like "American comedians," "American film actors," and "People from Benton Harbor, Michigan."
Oh, and one more: "Living people."
Sinbad was said to be among the upright after his page on the ever-evolving online encyclopedia briefly declared the performer dead of a heart attack.
"Somebody vandalized the page," Wikipedia spokeswoman Sandra Ordonez said Friday. "Whoever did this was obviously a prankster. I don't think they did this because they thought he [was dead]."
The bogus death notice was entered onto Sinbad's page on Wednesday, Ordonez said. It was caught, and removed, by a volunteer administrator about 30 minutes later, she said.
The prank was not quite over, though. The hoaxster got more mileage out of his or her handiwork, Ordonez explained, by sending out an email Thursday that contained a link to an older version of the page in which the heart-attack tale was still being spun.
The mis-history page has since been disabled. And Wikipedia has blocked Sinbad's main page from further edits by anyone—"for at least a good while," Ordonez said, "to prevent anymore vandalism."
Sinbad's publicist did not return an email seeking comment Friday. To Reuters, the comic's rep, who is also his sister, assured that "Sinbad is healthy, well and enjoying life!"
In an interview Thursday with the Associated Press, Sinbad personally addressed the matter of his alive-ness, and dated his Wikipedia death back to last Saturday, although the site insists it didn't occur until four days later.
As Wikipedia's Sinbad page correctly notes, the 50-year-old Michigan native is a comic and actor whose credits include sitcoms (A Different World, The Sinbad Show) and movies (First Kid, Jingle All the Way, Houseguest).
Sinbad's page is one of 1.6 million articles found on the English-language version of Wikipedia, which relies on the goodwill and good sense of its unpaid contributors for its largesse.
According to Ordonez, Wikipedia doesn't know the name of the prankster who messed with Sinbad, but it knows the prankster's IP address.
"The user who made that edit has been blocked," Ordonez said.
And Sinbad lives on.