I have repeatedly said that I don’t trust the internet and online journalism. This article is a testament to what I’ve been saying, proving that information that is rapidly released without proper fact checking can go crazy awry.
In a nutshell, French composer Maurice Jarre died. What’s up next? Writing an obit, and stat. When you google-search the composer’s name, the first thing you see is his Wikipedia entry.
As a test on multimedia and journalism, an Irish student added a phony obit-friendly quote to the page, which Wikipedia actually caught and removed several times. However, given that apparently Wikipedia meets ethical standards in reporting nowadays, writers copy and pasted that quote so fast without even bothing to check for a second source.
Finding something from at least two sources, if not more, IS NECESSARY. Anyone (obviously, as demonstrated here) can edit Wikipedia articles. This phony quote made it into many professional publications and blogs when it most certainly should not have.
And the kicker? Nobody even knew, until a month later when the student who added the quote confessed to his social experiment.
“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.”
I understand that some people might have done their research, quote on quote anyway, and found this quote on other Web sites. However, it still doesn’t dispute the fact that somebody lifted it without a second thought of verifying it. Which makes you wonder, how much other information is out there considered fact but is actually nothing but crap?
0 Responses to “Wikipedia: apparently a viable source for reporting”