Student's Wikipedia hoax quote used worldwide in newspapers
irishtimes.com
irishtimes.com
If you're using Wikipedia for anything more than casual learning, then you'd better make sure that you can find another source to confirm what you find (and make sure that that source doesn't cite Wikipedia).
Sources like Wikipedia or other encyclopedias are good for beginning to understand the topic, and finding relevant primary sources.
That is kind of why it always annoys me when somebody intentionally puts an error into Wikipedia. The message that usually comes out in the media is that Wikipedia isn't that should be used for finding primary sources, but that Wikipedia can be blatantly wrong and can't be trusted.
It seems like the message most educators get and send is that Wikipedia has little academic value, when it really is great as a starting point.
Right now encyclopedia companies seem to be operating on accuracy through obscurity, believing that if they control who edits the textbook, the results would have an acceptable level of accuracy. And that method can get good results. But that also means open encyclopedias will be viewed as more inaccurate for awhile, which means the errors are more public. I'm sure that everyone has had teachers complain about the accuracy of some textbooks, but those errors don't usually make news stories.
So I see hoax edits as somewhat comparable to a programmer intentionally putting a back door or easily exploitable code into open source software. The attempt could bring up problems with the code submittal process, and I'm sure that most well-run projects would quickly fix the error. But if the media got a hold of the story, it would not help convince technical managers and CIOs to take open source software seriously.
In my country we have an old saying "If the papers say that your sister is a whore, good luck proving you don't even have a sister!"
It's just the nature of the beast these days. With the revenue slowly disappearing, journalists have to provide cheaper articles. That's why almost every news article is a recycled press release or, like this case, poorly researched.
It's quite sad IMHO; if news is delivered online, there will be a massive dilution of revenue. There may never again be enough money in journalism to do extensively researched articles. Short of people doing it out of the good of their own hearts. Time will tell I guess.
Also, a journalist did not have to avoid Wikipedia to do a better job, they just had to use to the history feature and see the pre-death entry.
I understand the need to get information out when it's breaking news, but it seems editors are getting the same itchy trigger fingers we have associated with the bloggers & tweeters. They should be embarrassed at best, and probably reprimanded.
I get just as irritated by people who reflexively say 'you cited wikipedia LOL fail' which is usually an excuse to avoid reading something that contradicts or undermines their argument. Entertainingly, if you give the same person links to the sources cited in a given article, they'll just as often complain about 'ivory tower elitism'. teh stupid, it burns :-(
My point is that it's not very impressive to make lots of people believe things that aren't true.
Journalists have a responsibility to make sure they're printing the truth. It's really distressing to know that there are some out there who are so lazy. This particular example isn't that big of a deal, but it's easy to imagine something similar happening with something more important.
A notable ancient greek philosopher for 5-6 months or so: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/demomotus.htm
Still not too shabby.
While he was wary about the ethical implications of using someone’s death as a social experiment, he had carefully generated the quote so as not to distort or taint Jarre’s life, he said.