"DUBLIN - When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, 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 made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. 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 quickly caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first. A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began"...
Fitzgerald stressed that Wikipedia's system requiring about 1,500volunteer "administrators" and the wider public to spot bogus additions did its job, removing the quote three times within minutes or hours. It was journalists eager for a quick, pithy quote that was the problem."
By Shawn Pogatchnik
Do you find Wikipidea to be a reliable source?
Do you think this might reveal more errors in past news reports?
Will this change journalism?
2 comments:
good enough for me. Anyone who totally trusts anything they they read anywhere is an idiot. Good for the wiki crew for getting their opinion out there.
I agree with previous remark. On a side note, good job on the surprise party yesterday!
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