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Comment by swang | Hacker News Reader

A problem that prevents people from spotting things like this is that there are tons and tons of sites that just have copies of Wikipedia articles or the site just blindly copies things from Wikipedia.

For example... Alicia Keys birthday on Wikipedia is wrong, she was born in 1980, not 1981. If you read the Talk page about this there are several times where discussion of this takes place. But due to a Wiki Admin sitting on the page, he/she refuses to acknowledge this change and the articles he cites that she was born in 1981 most likely were using the Wikipedia article as reference. So how do you argue your position when the admin says, "Hey my source is Magazine X, it is reputable so therefore you are wrong"

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Wikipedia is not about truth, it is about verifiability. That's fine, everyone[1] knows this. Anything that appears in WP should be traceable to multiple reliable printed sources.

For the article you mention there should be some way of getting multiple reliable sources of a birthdate.

When one person sits on a page there's verious conflict resolution measure to jump through that might help. I hate WP so I'm not going to get involved but I guess there are some admins here who might want to help you.

What's troubling about the OP is that this WP article was a good article, and so should have had some kind of thorough vetting. That's disconcerting.

Also, once an article reaches good or great (or whatever) status I'm not sure if there's any way for visitors to get that exact version of the article, rather than just what today's edit it.

>What's troubling about the OP is that this WP article was a good article, and so should have had some kind of thorough vetting. That's disconcerting.

It did fail featured article review because it was missing page numbers. I can hope that if the hoaxer had then provided fictitious page numbers, someone would have looked for the sources.

>Also, once an article reaches good or great (or whatever) status I'm not sure if there's any way for visitors to get that exact version of the article, rather than just what today's edit it.

It'll be listed on the talk page, though obviously that doesn't help the average visitor. (Though, the average visitor probably wouldn't notice the good article badge in the first place.)

Yes I believe I suggested adding in both years as a compromise unfortunately the admin would not budge.

Going through various commitee groups on Wikpedia to get this compromise did not seem like a good use of my time

Perhaps it would be a good idea for disputes to be recorded with the wikipedia article i.e. in your case their would be a dispute registered in the foot notes over the birth date of Alicia Keys(with a link to the alternative put forward). This would allow others to investigate further if need be, adding any new information to the dispute as and when found.

Even the dispute footnotes would be disputed, and where would those go?

I was thinking there would be a discussion thread for each dispute.

"Anything that appears in WP should be traceable to multiple reliable printed sources."

However, even "professional" journalists have become so sloppy these days that it's likely that the printed source used Wikipedia as the basis for its information.

> even "professional" journalists have become so sloppy these days

This is not a new thing - journalists have been sloppy with facts for a long time.

It is simply more noticeable now, with multiple sources of information.

I think it's gotten worse with the coming of the web. When newspapers were printed once a day, they had a few hours to check facts and edit before press time. Now that a newspaper is expected to have a story published on the web minutes after it happens, there's much less time to do this. The newspapers have become much more like TV news.

> [1]

...did you not write the footnote or something?

There was recently a similar issue with the article for the singer Paloma Faith. To cut a long story short, Ms Faith claimed to have been born in 1985, and given that she claimed this fairly consistently, it was reported as fact in a range of publications.

Every official record, however, has her date of birth in 1981. On the talk page for the article, people were producing her record on the births index, on company incorporation documents, there was even someone who went to school with Ms Faith confirming she was born in 1981.

In the last couple of weeks the case went to dispute resolution and the issue has finally been resolved (i.e. her date of birth has been changed to 1981), but I was shocked by how pedantic certain users were being, refusing to correct the issue for technical reasons (the official documents are not accessible free-of-charge so could not be used as references, etc.)

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