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Phony Wikipedia Entry Used By Worldwide Press
Hugh Pickens writes "A quote attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre was posted on wikipedia shortly after his death in March and later appeared in obituaries in mainstream media. 'One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. 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,' Jarre was quoted as saying. However, these words were not uttered by the Oscar-winning composer but written by Shane Fitzgerald, a final-year undergraduate student, who said he wanted to show how journalists use the internet as a primary source for their stories. Fitzgerald posted the quote on Wikipedia late at night after news of Jarre's death broke. 'I saw it on breaking news and thought if I was going to do something I should do it quickly. I knew journalists wouldn't be looking at it until the morning,' The quote had no referenced sources and was therefore taken down by moderators of Wikipedia within minutes. However, Fitzgerald put it back up a few more times until it was finally left up on the site for more than 24 hours. 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. 'I didn't expect it to go that far. I expected it to be in blogs and sites, but on mainstream quality papers? I was very surprised.'"
I, for one, welcome our revisionist-history overlords!
Kid-proof tablet..
"First Post"
-Maurice Jarre
That just goes to show how much of a rat race life is. People working as fast as they can to spit out crummy, non referenced work to please the higher-ups.
The press is lazy, always have been. Nothing like sourcing your story in a few keystrokes.
"we have a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information."
As the author noted.
We see it all the time, where no one wants to delve into details & analyze something.
After all, that takes time & "I have to get my Latte @ Starbucks."
I am also struck by the lack of actual questioning of people "journalists" interview. It doesn't happen for the most part. It is mostly "star-struck fan time" when journalists interview the politicians and famous people.
And on the Internet you can spend $8 a month and $8 for a domain name per year, and have your own private site. Devote a shrine to anything, write bullshit, and Wikipedia's massive peer review team ("The Whole Fucking World") can't stomp all over you and delete your edits. Best of all, if you have a shiny Web design, people will 1) incorporate your shit in Wikipedia, citing it; and 2) use your shit to debunk other (actually factual) shit in Wikipedia because another "not-Wikipedia" site says Wikipedia is wrong.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
i think that perhaps news that the composer was on his deathbed was leaked and this guy put his wiki entry in. then the composer decided to check the interweb before checking out and realized he had final words to utter. and now he's a decomposer.
Journalists are lazy, film at 11. 90% of reports are just verbatim regurgitations of the AP wire (which has been subverted before too.)
My take on this is that it was just a troll, and he's invented a high-minded "social experiment" excuse now that it's got a little out of control.
Both the Guardian & the Independent has this quote in their obits.
So did BBC Music Magazine.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22maurice+jarre%22++%22music+was+my+life
The Guardian has even published a retraction blaming it on the Wikipedia vandalizer - poor Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/mar/31/maurice-jarre-obituary
This has happened so many times before that it isn't funny. To use one example off the top of my head, there was a debate on the page about Rutgers where someone claimed with no good sourcing that the University had had an opportunity to be in the Ivy League when the league was first formed. Edit-warring over this continued for some time until someone found a recent source that made the claim. Suspicious editors thought something was up and contacted the newspaper in question. It turned out they had gotten the claim from "somewhere on the internet" that is, Wikipedia.
Bottom line. Don't take a fact in Wikipedia unless it is sourced. Even then, check the talk page to make sure there's been no serious recent disagreement about the matter (checking the history helps too). And then, you can only trust claim as much as the source used. And don't trust things you hear in the general media without some fact checking.
OWNED!
I understand those words individually, but when you put them together like that they don't make sense.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I've pretty much given up on articles without citations. I don't find them particularly interesting any more because they beg too many questions in the light of skepticism. Perhaps the eventual fallout of this sort of thing will be that others have the same attitude :) Also a very good reason to cite Wikipedia with a permalink (which the cite link will do for you) as it will let people at least know WHY you said something TOTALLY WRONG.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
On the Diane Rehm Show on NPR, the topic today was the demise of newspapers and what could be done about it; suggestions included government bailouts and subsidies or reorganization as not-for-profit organizations. The "politically correct" argument was that they wanted to preserve the newspaper business model per se, but preserve "journalism" and all those high standards and ethics it embodied as opposed to the unprofessional world of bloggers and news aggregators who could (obviously) not hold themselves to high standards.
Perhaps the journalists could be Jarre'd back to reality?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
If it had to be done, this was a good way to do it. Maybe it should be done more.
expandfairuse.org
:\
And now they'll use this as another way to explain how wikipedia is "inaccurate".
And they tell me I can't use Wikipedia as a source for my high school research papers... Please, if the press can do it, I can do it.
There is currently no Wikipedia entry for Shane Fitzgerald. In the event that there is ever a Wikipedia entry for Shane Fitzgerald I wonder if it will ever be vandalized or maybe just used to store spurious quotes allegedly uttered by Shane Fitzgerald.
Think of the hilarity that could ensue. Make up something inane or stupid or obscene or whatever, attribute it to to Shane Fitzgerald and toss it into his Wikipedia.
e.g.
"I'm so hungry I could eat a bag of dicks." -- Shane Fitzgerald
I get my info from EncyclopediaDramatica, because that's always accurate.
It's not like "journalists" have never been there before....
if I was going to do something I should do it quickly. I knew journalists wouldn't be looking at it until the morning,' The quote had no referenced sources and was therefore taken down by moderators of Wikipedia within minutes. However, Fitzgerald put it back up a few more times until it was finally left up on the site for more than 24 hours. While he was wary about the ethical implications of using someone's death as a social experiment,
This is like someone expressing surprise and having ethical qualms about a biology experiment involving stabbing someone repeatedly until they finally die. While it does show that wikipedia is vulnerable, how is this any different from showing that a human body is vulnerable to stabbing, and if you try to stab someone enough times, eventually you will kill them?
What does this prove, exactly? That truth is malleable and that people with bad intent can use this fact to further their own ends? Did we not know this before?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
This happened with a composer a couple of years ago, his wikipedia page was updated saying he wrote a pop song (performed by SClub 7 if I remember correctly).
This was quoted in his obituary, and since many papers have *supposedly* banned the use of wikipedia in their newsrooms.
The problem is perhaps wikipedia is such a fast resource for grabbing large chunks of information, it just makes it too easy for the "journalists".
I'd suggest reading Mark Helprin's "Digital Barbarism" for much more on this topic (as an aside from the main thrust supporting copyright). It amazes me how the Internet has lowered the bar. Hell, when my daughter was three years old she used to cite herself as an authority: "Daddy, according to me..."
Fine then, let's try this:
In Soviet Russia, Wikipedia rewrites you!
Kid-proof tablet..
Note that this is the same type of failure as what happened in the mortgage bubble. Realtors and buyers and auditors were not actually determining the real value of the houses they were trading, but were merely checking to see what everyone else thought the value was. Most of the players (at least those with the most control) had an incentive to inflate the value. So the result was a spiral of home prices that rose far beyond the true value.
Now that the market has corrected and prices are closer to the actual value, all parties are crying foul and saying they don't want to have to "mark to market" or face foreclosure or bankruptcy for their inability to correctly determine the true value of their investments.
In the same way, Wikipedia does not check for actual truth of the statements it publishes, just that they are corroborated by some other medium or by some other website. This process is subject to the same manipulation and error that has decimated the global real estate market. In the same way, the consequences of failure are externalized by Wikipedia and not borne by any of its editors, contributors, or sponsors.
Caveat emptor.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I'm trying to make this into an art form with my new blog. I write completely fabricated science stories with the "ring of truth." My goal is to author a meme with the power of "Did you know we only use ten percent of our brains?" or "Did you know a dog's mouth is actually cleaner than a human's?"
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Why is Wikipedia no longer innovating?
The basic premise of the project evolved rapidly as the encyclopedia was developed in the early years- creating rules, policies and a vibrant and effective community; and now is a massive and globe-changing entity. However, to remain relevant, the site and the ideas that drive it must continue to evolve. To me, as a slightly disinterested outside observer, it seems that Wikipedia hasn't changed what they do or how they do it now for several years.
There is *so much* they could do to make explicit and transparent the edits, the timeliness of added information, and many other things - to handle issues like this - but they are not. Why?
You're right, it's not news, but that doesn't mean it should become accepted. Every time this happens there's a responsibility by the publisher to own up, and to reassess their practices. In effect, this is a type of public humiliation, and it serves the consumers of the content (not just in a "haha! Look at those idiots!" sense, but in the long run).
It's not news but it's a very sad state. I'd rather get my news 30 minutes later, and *fact-checked*, rather than "here's the latest from Twitter"...
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
... that this happens. But to be honest, if this had been done to a relative of mine right after his or her death, I would probably track down the author and attempt to break some limbs.
Check facts (Y/N):> Y
Option not available. Please try another option.
Check facts (Y/N):> N
Publish article (Y/N):> Y
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Since this was actually original content added to wikipedia, what can be inferred about the license and the usage it was given?
As per the GDL, doesn't the derived article in the paper must fall under that license as well? I've seen stuff like this on TV as well using videos from YouTube's users...
It enrages me that big content providers don't give jack shit about the little guy's stuff and STEAL to their heart's content in the name of fair use for they own profit, and the little guy doesn't have the right to use a picture or fragment of video/music to illustrate a point...
However, to remain relevant, the site and the ideas that drive it must continue to evolve
What's there to evolve?
You pick a topic, write something (hopefully) meaningful about it, let other people modify it to add information.
What exactly do you need changed in this procedure? Beyond these three points, everything else is window dressing.
Shane Fitzgerald PWNS the media. FLAWLESS VICTORY XD
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
This is something I've wanted since Wikipedia became big. I'd like to have a slider bar that allows me to highlight (say, in red) everything that's been changed within the last 7 days. And everything (say, in yellow) everything that's been changed within the last month.
That way, when I'm looking at an article on Albert Einstein I'll know when there is something strangely recent put in there. Also, when I'm looking at the swine flu article, I'll be able to set the slider bars for 12 hours/3 days and see what's new.
Yes, yes, it'll be a few more database hits, but think if everything you could do with this. And not just as a viewer, but as an editor.
Now, someone with way more time on their hands than me, please Make It So.
I'm not surprised by this given that an incredibly similar thing happened back in February with Germany's new Economics and Technology minister. Then again, there's something that stings much more about a phoney quotation showing up in an obituary rather than an extra name being added to a person.
The mere fact that supposedly responsible journalists are even citing Wikipedia shows what an intellectual cancer Wikipedia is on the Internet.
It most certainly is not. It's exactly as bad for a journalist to quote wikipedia as it is for a journalist to quote britannica or any other encyclopedia. Journalists are supposed to use primary sources, and they're supposed to check those sources.
Hell, I wasn't allowed to use encyclopedias as a source for my middle school papers, and you're saying the availability of wikipedia and it being "difficult to avoid" is an excuse for journalists? You don't go to a website to get a quote from the guy who just died, you call his estate and get information and statements from them.
Wikipedia is fantastic when used for the purpose of an encyclopedia. In others words, it's a great place to get a general idea about a subject and figure out what aspects you want to look at when you start your research. You don't ever, ever cite one or use information from one directly.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
.... cain't be wrong ...
sudo journalism? Is that like pseudo journalism on Ubuntu?
End anonymous moderation and posting on
Everybody misses an important point in that story: the fact the student had to repeatedly introduce the phony quote in the article and barely succeeded in having it live for more than 24 hours demonstrates that wikipedia is pretty good at self-correcting itself !
Look it up in Encyclepedia Brittanica and you will find it there. Verified and checked by a lot more than one person. People with a professional regard for what they are doing. Do errors creep in? Sure they do, but they are not only caught they are accidental.
I imagine Britannica isn't written this way, but many topical encyclopedias are farmed out to people with little or no expertise in the area of the entry they are writing. As a grad student, I have received several e-mails requesting interested students to write the entry for a particular topic in the "Encyclopedia of Coptic Literature" or something equally obscure. I know my classmates (and students in general), and I would not confidently rely upon an encyclopedia article they have written in almost all cases. The opportunity to write an article is advertised with the statement "get a publication on your CV."
Even with better encyclopedias, expert writers can still misrepresent things. There's an entry in the Encyclopedia Judaica, a very well-known and highly-regarded work, that essentially misstates facts about an Israeli intellectual property court case. Luckily, I had dug deep enough to figure this out, but it just goes to show you that you cannot rely on the accuracy of encyclopedia articles - even highly regarded ones. Oh, and it is unlikely errors like that will be corrected. If they are, it will be when a new edition is put out... in who knows how many years?
Encyclopedias are fine for well-known facts that you just don't happen to know, to get a basic overview of something, and for the bibliography at the end of the entry. Incidentally, those happen to be the exact same things that Wikipedia is useful for. Anything more serious than that, and you should be doing real research, not relying upon Wikipedia or an encyclopedia.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
For the first time ever I actually genuinely laughed at a Slashdot meme.
Now just imagine, a whole beowulf cluster of nested citations. [[[...]]]
All in jest, infinite that is.
Please don't drink and moderate.
Quack, quack.
"Whoever uses Wikipedia as a source without checking the references, might as well trust the Irish"
As Oscar Wilde once said:
"Whoever uses Wikipedia as a source without checking the references, might as well trust the Irish"
I know that quote is false, because it's not on Uncyclopedia.
Don't, in fact, trust any site where random 13-year-old admins and frothing-at-the-mouth ethnic warriors can argue over whether or not, for instance, Macedonia should be (God forbid!) actually called Macedonia. Or where there is a serious disagreement about whether or not to make it harder to insert lies into biographies - and the argument ends with the insane "consensus" decision that Wikipedia *shouldn't* make it harder to insert inaccurate information because allowing anyone (even imbeciles, liars, and felons) to edit is more important than the lives of real people who might be harmed by lies in their bios.
I could continue, but why bother? Eventually Wikipedia will either implode from its own idiocies or will be sued into oblivion.
'I didn't expect it to go that far. I expected it to be in blogs and sites, but on mainstream quality papers? I was very surprised.'
Why surprised? There are no mainstream "quality" paper, nor mainstream real journalism for quite some time now... at least since all mainstream media has come under the control of a handful of corporations not really bothered by information inaccuracy.
All of this has happened before and will happen again
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
It's amazing the kind of people who wouldn't want someone to spray-paint their car over and over to see how long it takes to clean it off, but will do it to other people because it's "just the computer". I wonder what future journalists and sociologists think their jobs are going to be based on 10 years from now. (P.S.: If someone wants this for Wikipedia or somewhere else for some bizarre reason - feel free to copy/modify it as long as you give the same rights to others for the copy/derivatives.)
I've been involved in skydiving and scuba diving for many years. Any time I have read an article about either one in the papers it is invariably inaccurate.
If they get the main thrust of the issue it's a good day.
Sure, the political reporters know about politics, and the sports reporters know about sport, but once someone has to write up a story outside his normal scope, it's as bad as any school child's homework essay.
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
I never watched Larry King Live more than a few minutes because of that reason. Did that guy ever ask a question that was not scripted by the guest or their team?
1. It was rebutted by Britannica long ago, and the rebuttal is on the very page you linked to. Short version: it turns out that if you review paragraphs taken out of context, make up non-existent Britannica articles, label stuff that's actually correct as Britannica's error, etc, you too can complain that Britannica is incomplete and superficial.
Oh yeah, and let's not distinguish between the occasional typo in Britannica and outright error. Let's pretend that all errors are equal. Then finally we dragged Britannica down at the level of a circle-jerk truth-by-consensus gang.
2. Well, I don't know about their methods, but based on my random excursions to Wikipedia, I'd say probably nobody vandalizes Britannica with whole paragraphs or even articles of 100% bullshit. Just as a random sample, off the top of my head, I learned from Wikipedia such things as that:
- didgeridoos are cloned in test tubes (the article stayed on the German wikipedia for more than a fucking year)
- iron is extracted from monkeys
- one of ancient Rome's bridges was manufactured in Japan
- that primus pilus meant _and_ _didn't_ mean "first spear" at the same time (different articles said polar opposite things about that)
And other such fine bullshit.
Basically when I go to Wikipedia, I have to wonder not only if there's some small omission or typo in the text, but whether the whole fucking article is (currently) a vandalism. I'll continue to have my doubts that that kind of thing happens to Britannica.
And here's a fun parting thought: if a source is so often wrong about the things that I do know about, I'll be paranoid about trusting it about the things that I don't know about.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Parent post is in need of up-modding of score, badly!
1. Well, some of us are brought in as consultants to bail a bunch of cargo-cultists out of the hole they have dug themselves into. I'm not talking about guessing about whether some completely unrelated job is done right or wrong, but about something which _is_ my job and theirs.
And when I see whole teams, "architect" included, think that it's a clever optimization to use Integer instead of int for your method's arguments, "because for an int Java copies the whole value on the stack, but for an Integer it only copies a pointer to it"... there are very few conclusions I can get to, other than that they're genuinely not qualified for their job.
2. Some things are well documented as anti-patterns, and not just in programming. I don't have to fully understand someone's job to find an exact verbatim example of why that's the wrong thing to do. Written by smarter people than me on the domain.
E.g., I don't have to be an MBA to recognize a corncob manager or a management feud when I see one.
3. Some things are just that obvious.
For example, the most... depressing thing I've seen was a team leader who was just using his Java project to try to prove that Java sucks and VB is much better. Blown deadlines and bugs were actually _good_ for _his_ agenda, because it just allowed him to run to some hapless non-techie manager and make a "see, that's what happens when you use Java!" speech out of it. And once you learned that, it also became more easily understandable why he's changing scope in mid-flight, move the goalposts, and generally doing anything to keep his project from succeeding.
Maybe I'm not fully qualified to do his job, but I don't think he's paid to do _that_. After all, if the company actually wanted that project never finished, they could have just not started it in the first place.
Or when you see whole departments do nothing more than get in the way -- e.g., DBAs who argue that simultaneously (A) it's not their job to tune the database, and (B) you can't get the rights to do that yourself either; apparently they're just there to make sure the databases run, but no more, and they just try to keep you from it, for fear of bringing it down -- it's hard not to get the idea that _someone_ in that organization is doing a crap and anti-productive job. Maybe it's not the DBAs themselves, but whatever dolt defined the IT's job as just making sure that the computers run, but _someone_ out there is definitely not helping get the real job done. The real job is to have a working complete system, and I mean including the software, not to have a computer from which users and developers are kept away from as much as possible.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This is especially interesting because people always tell you, you couldn't rely on wikipedia because it wasn't fact-checked, contrary to journalism (because journalists are the people who have the capital and education to do thorough research...)
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
That's nice and all, but no matter how many rules wikipedia has against vandalism, its still going to happen.
I'd rather see all the regular background vandalism plus the occasional high-profile hoax instead of just the regular background vandalism because high profile hoaxes are not experiments (if done right we know what the outcome is going to be), they are learning opportunities for the naive. And there will never be a shortage of the naive.
Better that a few deserving people or companies get caught with their pants down in a very public way so that the general public will have a very vivid and therefore easy to remember and understand example of the pitfalls of wikipedia than a bunch of regular people take too much of wikipedia at face-value.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
(~ LayeredTone)
Nope. No addendum for you. I already used you for 1,000 citations, in your original erroneous post, so it's now too much trouble to reverse them all.
(/~ LayeredTone)
More soberly, I think you yourself just proved an important part. Wiki's famous policy *politely* calls "Original Research" to give itself the authority to reverse the most outlandish rumors/gossip/mayhem. I'd really like a feature here for "MySlashdot" to RightClick/MakeTrollInvisible instead of being "held captive" with it still being present at -1. One step away from the famous bathroom posts, is the whole swath of quasi-benevolent stuff that kicks around for 7 posts until someone finally piledrives it with a +7 refutation.
But the "honest case" means that either we drag ourselves into documenting every word ever, or sometimes we quit at the "good enough" stage, until for one particular famous case it is not Good Enough.
Oh see, now I have to Cite something. Here's one of the piledriver ThreadEnder Informative posts below me.
by phantomfive (622387) Alter Relationship on Thursday May 07, @12:54AM (#27855769) Homepage Journal
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
That's nice, but it's missing the whole point.
Yes, it's happened before. Yes, it'll happen again. No, it's not a nice thing to do. But it will happen again anyway.
And _that_ is the problem. Something that is so easily vandalized, isn't that great a source of information.
If you will, I'll draw your attention to your own point:
_That_ is the whole point. If a peer-reviewed journal was as easy to "experiment" on, it anyone with enough time could redefine physics or history in it just because he was bored, then everyone would agree that it's a fucking useless journal. So, yes, how about we apply the same standard to Wikipedia?
Again: what's not OK, isn't just the experiment itself, but the very fact that it's trivial to make such an experiment. Not that just it's hypothetically possible, but that it actually happens again and again.
Yes, it means that some people are assholes. Do you have some safeguards against that? Because otherwise it's the same failing of techno-utopianism as of any other utopianism. If to work it would need everyone to play nice, stick to the rules, and know their own limits -- i.e., if to work it needs humans as a whole to change -- then that's the failure of any utopianism. Communism too would have worked perfectly, for example, if it weren't for those pesky humans who insist on being what they are instead of the new breed that Marx, Engels and Lenin envisioned.
That very need to scream that someone else didn't play by your rules, _that_ is what tells me that it's yet another failed utopianism.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Really?
1. I'll again point at the fact that a hoax about didgeridoos being cloned, complete with pictures of little didgeridoos in test tubes and considerations about the life expectancy of cloned didgeridoos, survived on the German Wikipedia for more than a year. So I guess sometimes it's not that great at self-correcting, eh?
2. _How_ he did it, is less relevant than the fact that it did survive. And yes, some people routinely seem have the time to get into edit wars, or even get more creative (e.g., invent bogus credentials) to have their version stick.
3. An objection that boils down to "yeah, but it takes effort", is a non-objection. If anything it's an illustration as to why the real experts eventually give up. Because routinely there's an idiot willing to invest more time and effort than the real expert.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Hope you don't mind if I use that...
... I read Worldwide Pants!
Never use Wikipedia as a source - use a source you can trust, such as a peer reviewed journal or a long-established encyclopedia* instead.
Oh, wait...
It always amuses me that wikipedia-bashing seems to be predicated on the faith that "traditional" dead-tree-based sources of wisdom are somehow infallible, peer reviewers are always rigorous and impartial, and if it wasn't true they wouldn't print it.
If you think that, when five typical academics peer review a paper (usually an unpaid job with a tight deadline) they double-check any the maths and stats, reproduce any experiments described, then go through every one of the citatons, pull the sources from the library and check that not only is the citation correct but that its not just an onward (and potentially circular) reference and do a literature search to see if anybody has debunked it... well, I have a bridge that you might like to buy.
The real advantage of Wikipedia, though, is that everything goes on in the public eye - you can always look at the history of the article. With a traditional publication, any shenanigans happen behind closed doors.
(* which is a terrific link because if anybody questions the findings about the accuracy of Britannica you just point out that they were published by Nature... :-) )
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
>Bloggers and the mainstream press distribute this >information, they don't (usually) generate it.
Unless you are CNN and you fabricate the news to suit the message being sent out.
Canadian jarhead Scott Taylor is editor of Esprti de Corps magazine and one of the true war correspondents like RObert Fisk and the examples he gives during his lectures of how CNN's Amanpour was trying to fit her storylines to fit the official story the US was pushing in the balkans (When Bin Laden was our ally) was stunning.
He on the other hand was often chided by canadian network heads that his stories which he would collect on the ground (not from a hotel room) didnt match the official versions given by our govt.
He mentions about how reporters would see something like ABC's report on a bunch of bearded foreigner's arrested in the Balkans with bombs in toys and be told that they were 'counter-terrorist' experts who were showing how to find hidden explosives that were of course used by theofficial bad guys. Even though it wasnt hard to see who they were and what they were arrested doing, reporters went out of the way not to discredit the insulting official version but tried to find a storyline which would support it.
As Taylor says, follow the storyline and your access to the people making the news will be intact. Follow the story instead like Taylor and you can be one of the first reporters kidnapped and released in Iraq and your story will be totally avoided.(Taylor was kidnapped at almost the same time as some reporter from France and his 10 day kidnapping was barely mentioned in his OWN country while the French one case was carried on a 24hr basis.)
Medias generate the stories they want to suit their needs. The idea of an impartial press especially when it comes to foreign affairs is nothing more than a myth.
01. Google on search term.
02. Click on the Wikipedia entry that invariable pops up in the first screen full of results.
03. Read the first few paragraphs.
04. Go to External links section, click on URL and get a 404: Page Not Found error.
05. Back to Google and click on some quotes from 03. above and get mutually contradictory references or downright contradictions from the primary sources in their own words, that Wikipedia in its collective wisdom deem not suitable for entry in the main article.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Find me a list of people that give a shit about the ethics of exposing journalists as lazy bastards and I'll send you a dollar for each. Yourself not included :)
Realise that just about everyone has an agenda. They all want something from you, whether it is money, loyalty, work, sacrifice, and simply persuading you is far easier, cheaper and more effective than trying to force you.
What wikipedia should do is aknowledge this fundamental truth about human communication and include a visible propaganda score for each edit and for each article.
Deleted
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Missing_link
All of this is true, but you're actually reinforcing the main point: journalists should not be using Wikipedia as a primary source for exactly the reasons you're giving.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the sourcing, but simply the fact that journalists from major newspapers, often with international reach, are simply going to Wikipedia and copy-pasting info into their articles in a way that wouldn't be acceptable to most high school writing teachers. When high school students are expected to perform more due diligence than professional journalists, we have a serious problem.
Some time back I was looking for the source of a catch-phrase I occasionally use: "A man with a sharp wit. Someone ought to take it away from him before he cuts himself." (or some variation on this phrase). So, what do I do? I google it... and find that as far as the Internet is concerned, I'm the author. There's plenty of references to this, probably more than enough to pass casual inspection by Wikipedians, with my name attached. I've found it in lists of "quotes by famous people", where I'm apparently a peer of people like Ghandi and Orwell.
And yet I'm still convinced I was quoting something I read when I first used it, maybe twenty or thirty years ago. OK, it's possible I'm mistaken, it's possible "I said it first", but I don't think so... but how could I prove it? Someone thought it was funny, put it in their Usenet sigfile, it got added to a collection of "fortune cookie" quotes, and now people all over the Internet are using each other as references.
I'm sure that a good many "famous quotes" that have been authoritatively attributed, because they've been found in independent sources, are similarly erroneous. Sure, it can happen faster on the Internet, but the social factors are the same whether the medium is digital or analog, Usenet or Newspaper, phosphor or ink. Some number of these, like Willie Sutton's "That's where the money is", have been disclaimed by the alleged author (kind of like what I'm doing now), but how many haven't... because the person involved was dead, didn't see them, or just thought they were good enough to keep?
Who knows, Maurice Jarre might have even approved of this one.
Where is it written that "professional journalists aren't supposed to use Wikipedia as a fucking source in the first fucking place"? I would have thought that you're more likely to find it written that "journalists should not treat wikipedia as an authoritative source". The problem is not that journalists reference wikipedia, it's that they treat it as authoritative.
Retractions are there to save the newspaper face, not to correct public knowledge.
Presumably, some people take pride in doing a good job (but have deadlines too). I figure they bemoan the lack of a better way of correcting public knowledge.
We should all be able to relate, right?
I mean, this is a site for hackers---people who love doing a technically good job within our field.
"It doesn't mean anything in terms of the quality..."
I respectfully disagree.
If you agree that, NEWS is business and people who understand how the system operates routinely manipulate channels for political purposes. Fitzgerald's act should be reiterated daily so no one grows up thinking they understand anything based on a single source, and so people who received that message yesterday might learn it over time.
As a public service, it does mean something. It reminds us that skepticism is valuable. Fitzgerald may go on to a brilliant career in PR, or, if he continues on this track, he may improve the world with additional acts of artful revelation.
Adbusters http://www.abusters.org/ is a group with similar intent. They attempt to wake us from our inner zombie using the same medium of advertising and propaganda (AP) used by 175 pro-war DoD "experts" to inculcate us to: [War=Peace], [Civilian Death=Collateral Damage], [Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL)=Spreading Democracy]
I am routinely disappointed in the American NEWS media by their attempt to promoter their own employees as experts, without proper disclosure of sources or logical argument of analysis. We need more people with the creativity and dedication to throw the drivel back in the faces of the pompous perpetrators of propaganda.
Nationalism and hubris to the exclusion of principled philosophical action are seeds decline. We write it off as corruption, which it is, however as we have become cynically inured to such behavior, we accept decline as inevitable. I believe most Americans expect better, they just don't know where to find it.
Hey! Pass the Democracy, please!
http://www.democracynow.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Moyers
AFP, AP, Reuters are not fail-proof. An agency (I think it was Reuters) once (mis)understood that Wikipedia was starting a search engine. This was a canard, and the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, issued a communique about it.
Nevertheless, the news got copied everywhere, and is still occasionally presented as fact by journalists.
This shows the vulnerability of modern journalism - a lot of it is basically copied from earlier articles, and a single error in a highly-placed source (say, AFP, AP, Reuters, or major newspapers) can be copied to many places without anybody bothering to check facts.
One major difference between Wikipedia and most online media is that it cites sources (and enforces citation as a rule, though enforcement is somewhat haphazard).
It is way easier to check some information if you are given an authoritative source for it. If Wikipedia tells you that some lizard men killed JFK, but cites no source for it, or cites some not obviously reliable source (say, a political blog), then just ignore that information. If Wikipedia says that according to some report, JFK was killed by such or such person, then Wikipedia will give you a precise citation or even Web link to the report.
So, in short, you're wrong. Sorting things on Wikipedia is easy if you simply bother to look for the citation links.
True, Wikipedia often catches the lazy, or those that lack the habit of reading footnotes and bibliographies.
All of this is true, but you're actually reinforcing the main point: journalists should not be using Wikipedia as a primary source for exactly the reasons you're giving.
I didn't address it because it seemed to be a given. However, just to make it explicit: the journalists have been had in this case, and it's their own fault for being incompetent by either (1) being so lacking in work ethic that they quoted Wikipedia as if it were a secondary or primary source, (2) plagiarizing #1 while simultaneously believing #1 was not just as incompetent; or (3) believing naively that their own press network (a legitimized form of #2) wouldn't actually be infested with #1 or #2 itself.
Shame on #1, shame on #2, and — even though high-volume news distribution requires interconnected news bureaus, shame on #3 eventually, since they reduce their own safeguards even below Wikipedia's level for people in their own press network. And on that note: Any news media journalist who makes fun of Wikipedia should be made to show the source for everything in the next issue of his publication, and have to hope "according to" happens to appears a lot in the main text of all those blindly-copied, often-uncredited press agency articles in the next 24 hours.
Uh, dude, there _are_ sources of information besides Wikipedia and newspapers. That's all I'm saying. Saying basically "yeah, but some newspapers were worse" is hardly an endorsement of Wikipedia's accuracy. It's a bit like saying that someone is more honest than Peter Lustig.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Errata: I meant Victor Lustig, sorry.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The wiki might be good for party facts, but not if really need to know something.
How many better sources are there?
The sources that Wikipedia cites?
*Every* article on Wikipedia that deals with something that I have in-depth knowledge on is wrong in some way or another. I sense a pattern.
The earliest computers worked by doing computations multiple times and using a majority vote on which of the results returned was correct. So long as one does the same thing with stuff returned from Internet searches, that usually leads to a pretty good result. If one also makes the assumption that Wikipedia is wrong on a controversial subject, it usually leads to an even better result.
All true.
Still, it does show that there's a problem, somewhere. Especially because it's been done before, there is no excuse this time. It's not an innovative, new idea that these poor journalists could have no idea could happen.
If they still fall for it, it shows that there's something seriously wrong, somewhere.
And without further studies, you can't say that "somewhere" might not be Wikipedia. It's certainly in part the journalists, but are your really, absolutely certain that it is 100% the journalists and nothing else?
Putting a "do not create hoaxes" sign up is a cuddly symbolic gesture, but if at the same time you make it absolutely trivial to do so, it might not be enough. Kind of like "don't walk on grass" signs when there's no reasonable other way.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
About a year ago, while making a blog entry, I decided to make a word up. As a side joke, I decided to link it to Wikipedia, so I went there and created the word and its meaning, both in English and Portuguese Wikipedia. One year afterwards, my make up word is still on the Portuguese Wiki.
The one on the English Wiki was removed a few minutes after I wrote it and I received a friendly warning from the editor, something on the lines of "I laughed a lot with your entry, but I cant allow it, since its bogus".
Currently on Google I get 128 hits for my word...
Thank goodness the kid came forward and set the record straight by telling us all the truth . . . we did check to make certain that he's telling the truth this time didn't we?
Personally I feel that Wikipedia will now continue to go downhill in quality, precisely because of their blind insistence on citations, every time, rather than accepting the word of acknowledged experts.
What makes an expert acknowledged? Surely if an expert is acknowledge, they can cite either their own publications in relevant peer-reviewed journals, or at least the textbooks from which they learned their expertise?
"Studies suggest that Wikipedia's reliability has improved in recent years, and it is increasingly used as a tertiary source." [1] [wikipedia.org].
Well, that's certainly a reliable source for accuracy about Wikipedia's accuracy. Studies suggest that my Slashdot comments over the years indicate that I should be elected President of the United States in 2012 http://www.xemacs.org/~steve
Can somebody please translate for me? I have no idea what any of that meant, and Google doesn't seem to recognize it either.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
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. 'I didn't expect it to go that far. I expected it to be in blogs and sites, but on mainstream quality papers? I was very surprised.'"
Isn't that the same excuse virus authors use when they get caught? "I didn't expect it to go that far". Whatever issues we have with Wikipedia, I don't think we should excuse this guy's irresponsible behavior any more than we should excuse a virus author's. He did use a famous person's death to conduct a social experiment, and as a result deceived a lot of people. Put the blame where it belongs.
Please take note of the comment above. AC and GP note important info about how journalism works.
Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness
[citation needed]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Citation
Peer reviewed journals have problems too. There have been several well documented hoaxes perpetrated in peer reviewed journals -- only some of which were intended to illustrate how easy it is to get published. (You could look it up in wikipedia!)
The cause is a common human error - if something SEEMS true and it would take effort to PROVE it true most people will simply assume the truth to be established. Scientists and historians are as likely to do this as anyone even though their professional standards are intended to prevent it. It's the "truthiness" error and everyone does it. Whether wikipedia or traditionally edited encyclopedias are better at detecting falsehood and fact corruption is unknowable. But wikis can be corrected much more quickly and if you use wikipedia as tool rather than a primary source it can be quite a good one.
[Insert pretentious and semi-clever sig here: ______ ]