Wikipedia facts

[Xazy]

Article

Irish student hoaxes world's media with fake quote

* By SHAWN POGATCHNIK, Associated Press Writer - Tue May 12, 2009 8:57AM EDT
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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.

"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."

So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version — or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.

"One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack," Fitzgerald's fake Jarre quote read. "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear."

Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources — none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.

When he saw British 24-hour news channels reporting the death of the triple Oscar-winning composer, Fitzgerald sensed what he called "a golden opportunity" for an experiment on media use of Wikipedia.

He said it took him less than 15 minutes to fabricate and place a quote calculated to appeal to obituary writers without distorting Jarre's actual life experiences.

If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source — and even might trigger alarms as "too good to be true." But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.

Wikipedia spokesman Jay Walsh said he appreciated the Dublin student's point, and said he agreed it was "distressing so see how quickly journalists would descend on that information without double-checking it."

"We always tell people: If you see that quote on Wikipedia, find it somewhere else too. He's identified a flaw," Walsh said in a telephone interview from Wikipedia's San Francisco base.

But Walsh said there were more responsible ways to measure journalists' use of Wikipedia than through well-timed sabotage of one of the site's 12 million listings. "Our network of volunteer editors do thankless work trying to provide the highest-quality information. They will be rightly perturbed and irritated about this," he said.

Fitzgerald stressed that Wikipedia's system requiring about 1,500 volunteer "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.

He said the Guardian was the only publication to respond to him in detail and with remorse at its own editorial failing. Others, he said, treated him as a vandal.

"The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source," said the readers' editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.

Walsh said this was the first time to his knowledge that an academic researcher had placed false information on a Wikipedia listing specifically to test how the media would handle it.

This is one of the big problems with the internet, is that research is not really done anymore, people assume "facts" from online as 'facts' and wikipedia is assumed to be a bible.

[Plan9]

Wikipedia as a Bible? Hardly. It's more like the inside of a public bathroom stall scrawled with trivia.

I'd imagine most professionals look at Wikipedia the way a classically-trained musician looks at Nirvana.

[BadNick]

I beg to differ on the Nirvana analogy...but your bathroom wall idea is right on the money. I think that's one of its "endearing" traits: you can read while taking a shit, or leaving one if you prefer.

[Plan9]

Originally Posted by BadNick

...but your bathroom wall idea is right on the money. I think that's one of its "endearing" traits: you can read while taking a shit, or leaving one if you prefer.

I didn't wanna get into crap talk, but I'm glad you got the picture.

[Baraka_Guru]

Wikipedia as a research tool is little more or less useful as encyclopedias as a research tool. They are virtually the same thing when it comes to information/knowledge.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

They are starting points for knowledge, not the be-all and end-all.

[dippin]

every single class I teach I tell students that they should not quote wikipedia in their final papers. Every semester, at least 5 do.

[roachboy]

personally, i don't have a problem with wikipedia. i don't buy the line that Named Authorities make infotainment more reliable, particularly not at the level of encyclopedia entries. which are problematic in themselves, particularly at the pop level (there are some good ones, though, but you may or may not read them...) wikipedia has to be read critically, but so does everything else.

wikipedia is relatively transparent when it comes to disputed information.

of course it changes quicker than paper-forms and so is open to getting pranked, but so what?

sometimes it seems that folk want Authorities so they can read something, pretend they know all there is to be known, and not think any more about it. but that has nothing to do with quality of information, and everything to do with passivity in the face of it.

[Plan9]

The illustrious peer review process must be maintained. High and mighty "authoritative sources." Integrity'd!

...

I like Wikipedia.

It's full of all sorts of random stuff and the references section of a Wikipedia page is often a great place to start when researching any given topic.

[dippin]

Oh, I like wikipedia. But to use as a source when a source needs to be used in an academic (or otherwise) paper is unacceptable. Not because wikipedia is unreliable (though it often is, but that is not exclusive to it), but because wikipedia is not a real source for anything. There is no wikipedia research division. Any finding or statement of fact is not originated by wikipedia itself, so the original source used by whoever edited the wikipedia entry should be checked and then used as a source.

[Plan9]

Originally Posted by roachboy

sometimes it seems that folk want Authorities so they can read something, pretend they know all there is to be known, and not think any more about it. but that has nothing to do with quality of information, and everything to do with passivity in the face of it.

You're my kinda genius.

[ring]

Yes indeed.
We need to keep a voluminous supply of petri dishes handy, though;
his appetite is voracious.

[highthief]

Originally Posted by Xazy

This is one of the big problems with the internet, is that research is not really done anymore, people assume "facts" from online as 'facts' and wikipedia is assumed to be a bible.

But how is that any different from students or journalists or anyone else reading a printed book or magazine article and treating what is written there as gospel? It's what generations of well-trained pupils have been doing for professors and teachers who demand obedience to established doctrine.

If anything, I'd argue that, in many circles, people are questioning things more rather than less, given the prevalence of Internet hoaxes, faulty info, etc.

The challenge in media circles is that there is such an enormous pressure to get articles out right away that journalists and editors may not be fact checking as often or as thoroughly as they should.

[Ourcrazymodern?]

Big words are big thoughts?
They have led us into war
and even worse things.

[dippin]

Originally Posted by highthief

But how is that any different from students or journalists or anyone else reading a printed book or magazine article and treating what is written there as gospel? It's what generations of well-trained pupils have been doing for professors and teachers who demand obedience to established doctrine.

If anything, I'd argue that, in many circles, people are questioning things more rather than less, given the prevalence of Internet hoaxes, faulty info, etc.

The challenge in media circles is that there is such an enormous pressure to get articles out right away that journalists and editors may not be fact checking as often or as thoroughly as they should.

Most books by good publishers and refereed articles have to go through an anonymous review process by other specialists.

[samcol]

Originally Posted by roachboy

personally, i don't have a problem with wikipedia. i don't buy the line that Named Authorities make infotainment more reliable, particularly not at the level of encyclopedia entries. which are problematic in themselves, particularly at the pop level (there are some good ones, though, but you may or may not read them...) wikipedia has to be read critically, but so does everything else.

wikipedia is relatively transparent when it comes to disputed information.

of course it changes quicker than paper-forms and so is open to getting pranked, but so what?

sometimes it seems that folk want Authorities so they can read something, pretend they know all there is to be known, and not think any more about it. but that has nothing to do with quality of information, and everything to do with passivity in the face of it.

I totally agree with you about wikipedia being better info than the talking heads on news shows. The majority of wikipedia is very accurate, and the parts that are contested are usually noted. It's a good place to get a general information about something you have no clue.

[Shaindra]

Wikipedia is a grand experiment in "collective knowledge".

[Martian]

Wikipedia is great for casual research. I find that if I'm looking into something with any degree of seriousness, the sources cited there are as good a place as any to start.

I consider it more of an aggregator than a resource in and of itself.

[highthief]

Originally Posted by dippin

Most books by good publishers and refereed articles have to go through an anonymous review process by other specialists.

That doesn't matter in this case. The way students have traditionally learned has long been reliant on simply learning what has gone before and parroting it back to the teachers. The same people go on to write the high school and college text books, and simply write what they had learned 20 years before (often in very narrow fields of endeavour, without understanding other fields that may impact their work) with only minor tweaks that don't reflect true original ideas or new concepts. Most such texts are actually long out of date by the time they are written and published as most fields are incredibly resistant to new theories and change.

The use of the Internet for research allows for the exploration and consideration of a far greater data set than you'll find in a text book - and even if some of the information on various sites is not always 100% proven, it can open the mind to far greater learning than what is contained a text book.

Unfortunately, Wikipedia is now so mainstream it is falling into the same trap!

[djtestudo]

As someone who is a student, someone who plans to go into journalism and someone who LOVES just sitting and reading Wikipedia to waste some time, I think that Wikipedia is a great innovation in the distribution of information. However, I would never, ever, ever consider using the information in an academic or professional context on it's own.

I believe Wikipedia is not a source: it's a REsource. It's a place to use as a starting point to learn about a subject and find additional information. That's why the citations are so important to the information that gets placed on the site.

I would consider using Wikipedia as a source to be like going to a city's tourism/visitor's center, reading the pamphlets and saying you went to all of the sites.

[xuvio38]

~~~~~

[Lasereth]

The actual SOURCES at the bottom of Wikipedia pages are as good as any other type of information used in a research paper. Professors don't want you to put Cake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia as a source, but using sources at the bottom of wiki pages is an excellent idea. Some wikipedia pages don't have sources so they shouldn't be used, but the ones that do have sources are perfect.

[BadNick]

please ignore the following off the main topic post:

Originally Posted by Matthew Vita

...one is obviously more complex.

-MV

I agree, but more complex seems to, more often than not, stand in the way of simple, raw emotion and energy...except in rare cases of genius composers. The technical challenge of playing something complex on an instrument, even playing it very well, does not always make good music.

[Plan9]

Originally Posted by BadNick

please ignore the following off the main topic post:

I agree, but more complex seems to, more often than not, stand in the way of simple, raw emotion and energy...except in rare cases of genius composers. The technical challenge of playing something complex on an instrument, even playing it very well, does not always make good music.

Hah!

[Randerolf]

Esquire wikis article on Wikipedia
When Esquire magazine writer A.J. Jacobs decided to do an article about the freely distributable and freely editable online encyclopedia Wikipedia, he took an innovative approach: He posted a crummy, error-laden draft of the story to the site.

Wikipedia lets anyone create a new article for the encyclopedia or edit an existing entry. As a result, since it was started in 2001, Wikipedia has grown to include nearly 749,000 articles in English alone--countless numbers of which have been edited by multiple members of the community. (There are versions of Wikipedia in 109 other languages as well.)

The idea is that, despite the fact that anyone can work on any article, Wikipedia's content is self-cleaning because its community keeps a close eye on the accuracy of articles and, in most cases, acts quickly to fix errors that find their way into individual entries.

It's the same argument programmers make about open-source software: Since everyone can see the source code, the community can collectively rid the software of errors better than a few developers at one company ever could.

With that dynamic in mind, Jacobs decided to craft an article about Wikipedia, complete with a series of intentional mistakes and typos, and post it on the site. The hope was that the community itself would be able to fix the errors and create a clean version that would be ready for publication in Esquire's December issue. The original version was preserved for posterity.

"The idea I had--which Jimmy (Wales, Wikipedia's founder) loved--is that I'd write a rough draft of the article and then Jimmy would put it on a site for the Wikipedia community to rewrite and edit," Jacobs wrote on the page introducing the experiment. Esquire "would print the 'before' and 'after' versions of the articles. So here's your chance to make this article a real one. All improvements welcome."

Neither Jacobs nor Esquire would comment for this story.

"For those haven't looked at Diderot's Encyclopedie recently, you should know that it is hopelessly incomplete," Jacobs' original draft began, typos and all. "For instance, it lacks entry on Exploding Whales. There's nothing on Troll Metal (rock music about goblins that eat Christians), autofellatio (a form of masturbation that be traced to the Egyptian creation myth) or Dr. Bombay (the physician warlock on Bewitched).

"No, you can only find those entries in one encyclopedia: The Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia that was launched in 2001 and has become biggest, most wide-ranging, most untamed reference work in history."

According to the Wikipedia page for Jacobs' story, the article was edited 224 times in the first 24 hours after Jacobs posted it, and another 149 times in the next 24 hours.

The final draft, which was locked on Sept. 23 to protect it from further edits, reflects the efforts of the many users who worked on it.

"What is the legal status of dwarf tossing?" the locked version begins. "Did people really worship Jesus Christ's foreskin as a relic? Where was crushing by elephant used as an execution method? And who is the mysterious galactic ruler Xenu at the heart of Scientology?

"You won't find the answers in Encyclopaedia Britannica. Only one place contains them all: Wikipedia. The free online encyclopedia has become the largest, most wide-ranging and most untamed reference work in history."

Along the way, the Wikipedia community worked under a few guidelines from Jacobs: "Use a punchy writing style--we're writing an article for Esquire; don't write like an encyclopedia--this is a feature magazine article; keep the word count close to the original--wiki isn't paper, but this article will be printed on paper."

And the users responded. According to the site, the original article was 709 words with 14 paragraphs, while the final edit was indeed punchier and included 771 words and 15 paragraphs.

Andy Baio, who wrote about the Esquire experiment on his blog, Waxy.org: Links, suggested the project provides a particularly apt example of how Wikipedians handle articles.

"I think it's great," Baio said. "Look at the activity. Every factual error was corrected within minutes, and the focus moved on to refinement, clarification and making the article more readable."

To Wales, the experiment was a good example of how a magazine might be able to use its readers to make for more complete journalism.

"It would be interesting to see things that might work well (with) factual articles about whatever," Wales said. "If somebody like Time does an article about an election season and lets people work on it, that might be fun."

But he also said that media organizations need to be careful about who they let interact with their work.

Wales pointed to a recent experiment in which The Los Angeles Times tried a "wikitorial" in which its readers could collaboratively work on editorials.

"It was more or less a complete disaster," Wales said, "because they didn't have a community built up, so they just had tons and tons of random people (involved). They had to take it down because there was too much vandalism."

Kelly Martin, a Wikipedia user who helped edit Jacobs' piece, said the experiment worked significantly better than an earlier trial in which a television station tried to get Wikipedians to co-edit an article.

"The directions and guidelines were far less clear (in the case of the TV station's experiment) and the end result was confused," Martin said. "This one seemed to do much better. I think the community was more aware of it this time, so we had more resources monitoring the article for inappropriate edits."

In any case, while Wales applauded Jacobs' effort, he remains conflicted on whether he would get behind similar projects. Ultimately, he said, it boils down to the Wikipedia community's reaction.

"I'm not sure I would recommend it as a way of explaining Wikipedia," he said. "Maybe it is pretty good. It worked pretty good, and the community found it fun and exciting."

Read the Article (before and after) here

AS sketchy as the Internet can be with information, the real indictment here is the laziness of some print media writers. Writing is a lot of work (and that's why I decided not to go into it, especially after those 8AM journalism classes on the other side of town. Nobody was meant to write that early unless, you've been up all night.) I've heard that even newspaper writers can get sloppy and just regurgitate press releases and fail to make the effort to break stories and investigate.

Trust the Internet with my information? Pornography? Sure. Research? Use a lot of independent sources and do the best you can.

Isn't wikipedia like the ole Guinness books -- great for when people got drunk and started debating facts? Speaking of the drink furthering humanity: people tend to forget that the encyclopedia, as we know it today, was compiled by communities in the UK a little like what we see on the internet (sans viral videos of Chocolate Rain). Forget the French.

[roachboy]

I believe Wikipedia is not a source: it's a REsource. It's a place to use as a starting point to learn about a subject and find additional information. That's why the citations are so important to the information that gets placed on the site.

there's something kinda strange about this distinction. of course, how strange it may be is a function of the discipline that you work in, but still...

as a preamble, since others are giving them, i'm trained as a historian and taught for quite a few years and may do it again...

when you start out in this kind of game you are presented with a bunch of assumptions about how academic infotainment operates that get less and less obvious the more you think about/have experience of what they actually entail.

the idea of an "original source"---what exactly does that mean?
what exactly does the presence or absence of footnotes get you? what do you do with the footnotes you encounter? typically, if you are not yourself researching a topic similar to what you're reading about, you won't chase the footnotes: you'll simply see in them some kind of guarantee of some kind of legitimacy...but on what basis? just because you're told that's what footnotes let you see? citations add a certain degree of transparency to a text, but if you think about it, it's actually less transparent than are questions of method and/or procedure, which are generally somewhere in the machinery of the text itself.

you could say, and folk do, that cites are a way to acknowledge what you appropriate--but if you think about it, everything is appropriated (for example, it's not like you're inventing logic when you use it; it's not like you're inventing anything in terms of sequences of words that you make....), so what they amount to is an acknowledgement of particular types of appropriation--what you can remember; what positions your work socially within a particular academic context. and this seems more the function of citations---positioning within a particular discourse or set of discourses---not a guarantee of anything.
it's easy to imagine that someone can develop entirely absurd interpretations littered with citations. it happens *all the time*....
for example, it's not as though the fact that you cite a bunch of sources means that you're not cherrypicking. this too happens *all the time*...

what exactly is original research? in history, the standard mythology involves a heroic Explorer heading into an Archive to wrest a text or image from the Obscurity of a box. the "original research" element consists in the integration of this New Tidbit back into the grid of already available tidbits. if you push at this---or the notion of "original research" in most any field--things start to dissolve.

peer review seems useful as an editorial process, but doesn't guarantee anything about the quality of a piece or the interpretations advanced in them--what it does function to guarantee is that whatever's in a piece conforms to the perceptions particular to the reviewers of what is or is not the state of the field at that moment. in it's detail---in what you get back from a reviewer for example---you can get tremendously helpful (or destructive) information--this is important because typically you do not get a whole lot of feedback about what you publish out there...i'm continually surprised that anyone's read any of my stuff because from what i hear back, it might as well not exist...so the texts might be better edited and maybe better overall for the editorial side of the review process---but as a guarantor of anything, as a process that one points to and says "x is a scholarly journal" because "it is peer reviewed"---i think it's pretty much meaningless.

you aren't off the hook for critical reading. there's no way off of it.

[IdeoFunk]

Originally Posted by Lasereth

The actual SOURCES at the bottom of Wikipedia pages are as good as any other type of information used in a research paper. Professors don't want you to put Cake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/url] as a source, but using sources at the bottom of wiki pages is an excellent idea. Some wikipedia pages don't have sources so they shouldn't be used, but the ones that do have sources are perfect.

Yup, this point hits it exactly. From Wikipedia you can often find a valuable list of relevant sources when researching some topic.

But yea, if anything, I think this story showcases some striking and disappointing ineptitudes among these journalists.... almost makes my hometown newspaper look half decent.

[ngdawg]

As a quasi-journalist, Wiki is the first stop to gather preliminary information but never as a final or only stop. And when I'm in a debate with someone and they quote something from there, my head screams "unacceptable!" and I'll try to verify that info elswhere. If I can't, then the opposer to me is less than accurate.
For my side, I try to get 3 different sources away from Wiki before I'll consider using it, which by then makes it kind of moot.
It's like buying wine at Walmart. Might be just as good if cheaper, but just doesn't "feel" right and makes me think "inferior".

[xuvio38]

~~~~~

[MSD]

Wikipedia is a secondary source, it's that simple. They have an official policy prohibiting original research and the community tends to enforce it well, especially in articles where there is little controversy.

I'd also like to use this platform to promote my proposition that, rather than calling obsessively dedicated Wikipedia editors "Wikipedians," we use the term "Wikipedophiles."