Wikipedia hoax fools newspapers

Well, that makes it open season, I guess.

 

I believe the premise was would idiots who should know better just blindly take stuff off a wikipedia site without doing any kind of checking or research.

And he didn't "make stuff up" about other people. He attributed a non-offensive quote to him that he never really said.

If that was grounds for getting beat up, lots of sports writers would have their nuts stomped on.

 

Making up quotes is OK? Whoa
Making up quotes isn't lying? Double whoa

Do we even work in the same profession?

 

I must have missed the part where this college student is a working journalist.

Nobody's saying it's right, but it's not like he killed a guy. He's a college student. They do dumb shit. So what?

And by the way, I'd guess 10 percent of the shit on Wikipedia is made up, anyway. It's not like he was re-writing the Bible.

 

I don't know. I work in one where I comprehend stuff.

I didn't say making up quotes is OK.

I didn't say anything about lying.

I work in a profession where I don't believe you trust in the veracity of wikipedia entries.

Bottom line: The kid was being naughty. The folks who used the quote are lazy and poor at their jobs and/or hobbies.

 

/thread

 

Besides, Wiki is more verifiable than the Bible. [/ducking]

;D

 

From the story that was linked:

DUBLIN (AP) — 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.

...

"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."



That doesn't sound like some punk kid pulling a prank to me. It sounds like an intelligent student exposing a problem. His means might have been somewhat questionable, but much less so than the suppposed professionals who blew this one. He didn't
make up a quote to a reporter, which would have been more of a prank type thing.

 

Next time some softball coach makes up names or stats for an opposing team when calling in a box score, there better not be any bitching on this site. After all, it's not really offensive, and his premise was to get a result, any result, called in.

 

And that is not remotely comparable to what happened here.

 

You trust the softball coach to not make up shit, and you call him out on it if you find out otherwise.

Do you trust Wiki? Really? When ANYONE can mess around with it, solely for giggles? Hell, some guys on our fanboard edited a football player's page to make it look like he'd signed with "our" team (and posted the play-by-play as they did it), then waited for someone to run screaming back to the board with the "scoop." Took about 10 minutes, and we mocked the crap out of that guy.

(Add: In fact, after posting this thread, he became part of the next update.)

Actually running something based on a Wiki source? No thanks.

 

I'll repeat what I said earlier: Plenty of fault with the journalists who didn't check this out.

INDEPENDENT OF THAT: It's bullshit that this kid played out his experiment with some guy's Wikipedia entry. I don't want people making shit up about me, so I'm not going to like someone doing it to someone else.