When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he was testing how our globalised, increasingly internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.
His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.
The sociology major’s obituary-friendly quote – which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death on March 28 – flew straight on to dozens of US blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia twice caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it.
A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets they’d swallowed his baloney whole.
“I was really shocked at the results from the experiment,” Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.
“I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” he said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”
Found by Allister Jenks.
why dont journalism professors and high school teachers FAIL kids when they cite wikipedia? wikipedia is a good source, but should only be a start of research just for this reason. oh thats right, we dont get F’s anymore…we get E’s and other crap grades like that so the students self esteeeeeeem doesnt get hurt. you reap what you sow, especially with the media….
#1. When the newspapers, who generally are considered a reliable source, are grabbing stuff off of Wikipedia, then why should Wikipedia be deemed any more unreliable than the newspapers?
This is why the newspapers are dying. What ever happened to investigative reporting?
I don’t know if this is an existing feature on Wikipedia, but couldn’t they easily include an annotation that shows how many times their editors have removed an item, or even performed corrective edits on an entry to help flag it as suspicious?
RBG
This is the dark side of the internet’s destruction of journalism. Advertisers will no longer support print (and the editorial staff involved) in favor of the instant gratification of the ‘net. Very small staffs (there are no proofreaders or copy editors at most of the publications I know of) can’t vet content the way they used to, and web-driven publishing speeds preclude follow-up.
Nobody knows where this will all go. there are no business models for publishing that really work right now.
“The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows.
The British journal Nature examined a range of scientific entries on both works of reference and found few differences in accuracy.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm
4 smartalix
On the other hand, how many people actually use 98% of the news for any practical purpose? Mostly news exists as mere entertainment with advertisers only caring about “how many eyeballs.”
RBG
None of my teachers in high school accepted Wikipedia as a source. They said it was a good starting point.
I took all the advanced placement English courses when I was in high school. We did a lot of writing, but almost all of it was style or rhetorical “analysis” of various literature. I can only recall writing one research paper where citing sources was actually an important part of our grade.
I never understood why there was so much focus on analysis BS rather than useful writing skills in high school. I didn’t have to write an opinion/argument or proposal paper until I was in college.
Well done kid. It’s hard to say who’s really dumber. The masses or the media. I’d have to give that honor to the media, they’re supposed to be the “educated” doing a job.
They really are no better than Fox vs MSNBC & CNN. No fact checking and moronic opinions.
bfd
wikipedia is a horrible source for info , and that is final.
An occasional hoax like this is an excellent reminder of how easily we can be sucked into believing something we want to be true, even if the source’s reliability is questionable.
That said, the need to verify a quote like this isn’t as great as the need to corroborate accusations of wrongdoing and other items of similarly greater importance.
It seems easy to spoof. Put up false information that goes unsourced. Wait for a publication that publishes your information and then go back and add a reference to the just published information as your source.
By creating references, you add the perception of a legitimate information.
#12 Duger, good strategy. I think that is what’s called an echo chamber or something like that.
Scooped again on cagematch.
http://cagematch.dvorak.org/index.php/topic,7177.0.html
I continue to be impressed by wikipedia, not that they’re infallible, just impressive.
Have the URL rules changed again? There’s no triple W in my link.
That’s because journalists are no longer required to type 30WPM on a manual typewriter to get into J-school like I was. Wikipedia is EASY! Slacker Journalism.
Yeah, oh for the days of proving your journalistic chops by understanding the time-consuming intracacies of white-out that spurn other slacker innovations like word processors.
RBG
I still remember the olden days when we told our stories by carving hieroglyphics in cave walls. It was pretty important to get the facts straight because corrections were a real bitch 😉
It is sad that so many newspapers (and blogs) used the quote. It is even sadder that no one caught it afterward and the student had to come forward to explain the hoax.
You didn’t get it – it’s about discipline. Building discipline. That’s what’s lacking.
#2 – No, they don’t get.