Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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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.
If it had to be done, this was a good way to do it. Maybe it should be done more.
expandfairuse.org
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And now they'll use this as another way to explain how wikipedia is "inaccurate".
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.
It's not about working fast, or Wikipedia, or referencing sources. It's about people and companies making a professional living supplying news in a non-professional manner. Some people spend tens of thousands of dollars to go to school to learn how to do research and journalism, and some people actually write their own essays without any help from their friends or families. Those people, unfortunately, have the disadvantage of being honest and intelligent. When it comes down to it anybody can do journalism, but it's only people who can write good resumes that will get the job. It's the same in all industries. The world keeps on turning, however slanted the orbit may be.
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"
The Guardian blaming wikipedia really shows they have no shame about it at all. I thought it was one of the better UK newspapers, very disturbing...
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.
As long as there have been reporters, there have been people who lied to reporters. Fitzgerald's stunt is just a high-tech version of this. It doesn't mean anything in terms of the quality of reporting today vs. some half-mythical golden age of journalism.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Because Jimbo Wales is earning from it nicely the way it is, thank you very much.
The point had nothing to do with Wikipedia, but with the poor journalism practiced by people that purport to hold themselves to a higher standard.
Everybody seems to think I'm lazy I don't mind, I think they're crazy
They got bogged down due to their own weight. It's not easy to do anything when you have millions of people using your site, millions of articles, etc. They were able to innovate when they were small, nimble, and could afford mistakes.
The Guardian has even published a retraction blaming it on the Wikipedia vandalizer
Actually they've worded it quite fairly and I think they're brave to have admitted to falling victim to the hoax.
Slashdot headlines with "Phony Wikipedia" should be marked {{tautology}}. The mere fact that supposedly responsible journalists are even citing Wikipedia shows what an intellectual cancer Wikipedia is on the Internet. Wikipedia is extremely difficult to avoid - there are many thousands of scrapes of Wikipedia around the Internet and millions of blogs that cite it. Any alternative to Wikipedia (and I don't mean Citizendium) had better grasp why Wikipedia is so easily disseminated and deliver something better.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Something more reliable, like the newspaper? The same newspapers that are apparently referencing wikipedia without checking it? Why would you trust them to find a more accurate source if wikipedia did not exist.
Studies have shown wikipedia to be, in general, nearly as accurate as more established encyclopedias. But that isn't the point.
The point is that by not hiding behind an establishment of respectability, wikipedia shows that trusting any single source for your information is ludicrous. When Britannica is wrong, no one writes an article about it.
It's about people and companies making a professional living supplying news in a non-professional manner.... it's only people who can write good resumes that will get the job. It's the same in all industries.
I think you're right about it being a wide-spread problem. It really only took a month in my first job to realize that most people at the company-- and it was a successful company-- weren't any good at their jobs. I was awestruck and wondered, "How can a company of such incompetent people be so successful?" and then I realized it was because our competitors were equally incompetent. It didn't take me much longer of looking around and talking to people to decide that it wasn't limited to my industry. Most people are not good at their jobs.
I think that's why the banking system is in the state it's in. You have a bunch of people running these banks who aren't good at their jobs. They're doing what seems to be working for their colleagues and competitors, but it's the blind leading the blind. No one knows what they're doing.
If that doesn't fill you with dread and terror, realize that it's the same for your doctors, your policemen, and everyone else who your life depends on. They're probably not very good at their jobs and they don't know what they're doing.
It's not fair to blame Wikipedia for that. Wikipedia offers a "clearing house" for commonly held knowledge, an unfiltered method of exchanging both verified and unverified facts.
If journalists, who are expected to exercise thoroughness, professionalism and proper methods of investigative journalism have become to retarded that they simply quote whatever "research" they first trip over, then that's their fault.
Seriously, we in the west want to get all high horsed about our "free media" and point fingers at places like North Korea where the news is state run. Personally, I say clean up our own back yard before complaining about the mess next door.
I hate printers.
Seriously, we in the west want to get all high horsed about our "free media" and point fingers at places like North Korea where the news is state run. Personally, I say clean up our own back yard before complaining about the mess next door.
Exactly. And at the same time, all the newspapers are claiming that the Internet is putting them out of business due to blogs and such, but that "citizen journalism" cannot compete with the quality of traditional journalism due to the costs of putting reporters on the ground in various newsbreaking places around the world.
Then they go and pull a stupid stunt like this.
If that "citizen journalism" that they complain about so much is so bad, why the hell are you using it for your sources?
I don't care whether it's a single source or multiple. It simply says that they don't believe their own propaganda.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
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.
And yet, somehow, we all know how to do everyone else's job better than they can! What a fucked up world -- should we all just shuffle our jobs around like in the game of Life? (Milton Bradley, not Conway)
Journalism is entertainment. Using a single source with no fact checking is probably the norm, and why not? A head-line and a few choice sound-bytes is all we expect anyway.
Quack, quack.
Well, if you're looking for a journalist's job, I hope that you could write one hell of a cover letter, at least.
You're right, but I can't help but wonder whether that's unfortunate. Is the most important qualification for a journalist that he can write really clever and impressive journalist-y prose? There's definitely a sort of writing you see these days in newspapers and magazines, and it's really great and pretty and reads like the sort of writing you'd expect to win awards, but it's awful.
Every time I read an article on something I know much about, it's misleading, filled with inaccuracies, buries the main idea, and often enough, completely misses the point. Plus it's hard to read because it's too flowery and self-indulgent.
All of this is just to say, maybe being able to write one hell of a cover letter isn't so much the point. Maybe it's better to find someone who's honest, thorough, and clear.
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 !
Except they skipped the part where they didn't take blame for using Wikipedia as a source in the first damn place, because professional journalists aren't supposed to use Wikipedia as a fucking source in the first fucking place.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
[blockquote]The moral of the story is that we are supposed to be smart enough to check more than one source when using ANY reference tool unless we are ready to suffer being the fool.[/blockquote]
Which is a damned circular argument given the echo chamber Wikipedia encourages as this story shows. I'll bet it wasn't more than one reporter that used this bogus quote. In fact a search for the phrase, "One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack." returns 616 references on Google. Granted, many are repeats of this article which further goes to the fact the Internet is an echo chamber. The point really is that the Internet should never be quoted as definitive in ANY research for news stories because it is too unreliable.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
It's not that they got bogged down under their own weight of users and articles - it's because the lunatics are running the asylum and they got bogged down under the weight of policies, procedures, and consensus.
So, in a comment thread under a Slashdot article that's about mainstream media doing shoddy reporting, you cast aspersions on a study in a peer-reviewed journal and use a USA Today article to back your claim up?
As an aside about this particular incident, I find it enlightening that despite active attempts by Fitzgerald to keep his bogus quote in the Wikipedia article the longest it managed to stay there was 24 hours. On the other hand the various news articles in non-user-editable media are stuck with it. So Wikipedia does seem to be working quite well here by comparison.
Of course the said thing is, when it gets added back to the article, they'll just cite the mainstream newspapers that copied the phony quote. And then it'll become a part of the ever burgeoning body of Wikipedia's New Truth. Facts? Facts be damned, we don't need those in an encyclopedia.
Santa's suicide mission go!
This was NOT an AP or Reuters screw up. They are the ONLY people that are really "putting reporters on the ground in various news breaking places around the world.". Please learn the difference.
"the Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers." -- These are completely different. What they do is have a bunch of people that sit at desks and write stories that are profitable. These fools can be replaced and they are being replaced.
AFP, AP, Reuters are not the same. They cannot be replaced by blogging armies. If they fail we will be entering a new Dark Ages. We will have no real journalists.
The stamina of false information, and the circulatory of citation, is what's really the issue. There are a lot of falsities that get passed around as assumed truths. Our system of "knowledge" is really fragile - unless we've witnessed ourselves (and this is true for historical information as much as it is for scientific "knowledge") it's just folklore with institutional power.
In other words, data really is the plural of anecdote.
That was why revisionist history came into existence: to put to the test claims that had gone unchecked for decades.
This, as mentioned, is a bogus study.
It wasn't a bogus study. It involved a panel of experts, including nobel prize winner Roald Hoffmann; and Michael Gordin, the Princeton expert on Mendeleev. They've published their methodology, so you can review it. Your link, on the other hand, comes from an opinionist in USA Today, who basically makes snarky remarks about the situation without actually analyzing the situation. USA Today, while a fine newspaper by some counts, has by no means established itself as an arbiter of truth and rationality.
You can check the methodology for yourself: go here and click on supplementary information and you will see the whole list of errors they found, both in Wikipedia and Britannica. Whether it turns out Wikipedia or Britannica is more reliable, it is clear Britannica is not the pinnacle of reliability they wish they were. Look at the error list: in nearly every Britannica article they found an error.
Now that you've looked at the evidence itself, what is your opinion? Where were the errors in their methods? Do you find that their conclusions were poorly founded? You have no need to rely on USA Today, you can look for yourself. Which is always much more satisfying, in my opinion.
Qxe4
LOL @ the wikipedia defender acting like the burden of proof is on someone else.
I could post "2+2=4" to wikipedia and it'd instantly get slapped with [citation needed], but the claim that wikipedia is accurate is to be taken as-is unless there is a "refutation"?
As I said ... LOL.
Mischievous deception of news agencies has a storied history which long predates Wikipedia:
So, yes, people can be tricked. But you'll notice most of these types of pranks (including the one on Wikipedia) are inconsequential. You might argue that's because the pranksters are well-meaning, but it does make it uniquely hard to verify the stories, since whether they did or didn't happen has no lasting effect. Did Skaggs actually take out an ad for a doggie brothel he intended to open, or did he actually just take out an ad for a doggie brothel he was pretending to indend to open? Did one person pen a poetic remark about music influencing his life, or was it somebody else? Yes, it would be better to have the absolute truth even on such trivial issues, but this is not necessarily indicative of equally faulty reporting on more weighty matters. (Those kind of lies usually take somebody higher up in the government to start them :)
Studies have shown wikipedia to be, in general, nearly as accurate as more established encyclopedias.
But the vandalism! The situation in TFA is not unique.
A journalist writing a story about carrots may at any one time find information that's either not relevant or not entirely truthful, or even raise unwarranted fear about the subject.
Journalists citing wikipedia on more controversial topics may at any point in time have read one iteration in an edit-revert war. Which of the two versions is correct?
Then publish your findings. It's really not that hard, just take some pictures of the engine with the size clearly demarcated, and some scans of the manuals. Then show your references from the museum. Then change it back. Challenge anyone who wants to post the other number to come up with pictures. Reasonable people will probably agree and if not, then other reasonable people will side with you.
That's the cool thing about wiki: if it's something you care about, and if you care about truth being preserved, then the power to enshrine that truth is at your fingertips. In general, an expert with some persistence will beat out a random editor.
So quit bitching and get that number corrected! Do it for the children!
'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.
No, they haven't.
I think that there is the problem. Most of the experts seem to easily give up when faced by the Wikipedia system. Expert: "Um... actually, I'm the most reknowned expert in this author, having published 40 books about him, so I can really state with certainty that his favorite color was in fact blue." Wikipedia-Drone: "Original research! Reverting to 'fuscia'!" Expert: "Wikipedia is worthless. I'm going home."
If the expert has to dedicate hours of his valuable time to correct even the most trivial error, the people who have time to devote their entire day to Wikipedia are going to win every time.
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.
Experts in a field we are quite busy publishing their findings, which for whatever reason is not a valid citation on wikipedia. As a scientist its what I am paid to do. I am not paid to fight with some unemployed self appointed editor of "knowledge" who's only qualification seems to be the ability to over pedantically interpret arbitrary rules.
The wiki might be good for party facts, but not if really need to know something.
To be honest we have better things to do with our time.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
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.
The problem with that is that anybody can claim to be an expert. As a reader, I have no way of knowing. However, if somebody loads a picture of the engine to flickr and cites it on the article, we know he is right.
Of course it also highlights that Wikipedia needs to be more fastidious about the quality of its references, to ensure that it's never indirectly referencing itself. Only allowing references that demonstrably predate a bit of information's appearance on the Wiki, for example. On the upside, Wikipedia's now demonstrably equal to or more reliable than journalists!
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
If I know the right value, then fixing the Wikipedia facts is not actually that important to me any more. I might offer the information and citation as a general public service, but taking a photograph of the engine, downloading it to my computer at work (which doesn't have the cable for my camera), then uploading it and justifying the interpretation just to correct some trivial error? It wouldn't be worth it to most people.
Actually, modern journalism is about profit. A headline and a few sound-bites are all that is required to bring people to look at the advertisements on the page around the arcticle, or see the commercial. Some of us, at least, expect more. But we don't get it, and they don't care as long as they get the advertisement revenue. It's all about filling pages with "stuff" to attract some eyeballs.
--
The early bird catches the worm. The worm that sleeps late lives to see another day.
The problem is that Wikipedia does not recognise experts or primary sources. In the eyes of Wikipedia, everyone is the same plankton level contributor who can only be trusted as far as they can google sources.
Therefore, the people who really write Wikipedia are the people who write in "reliable" sources, which seem to include things like newspapers or blogs where the author spent 1 minute researching their subject on Wikipedia itself.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Facts be damned, we don't need those in an encyclopedia.
You mean: Facts be damned, we don't need those in the media.
It was the media who kept this statement rather than taking this down. It was the media who took their facts from somewhere that didn't cite a source. It is the media who never cite their own sources - whether they have them or not.
But hey, let's all blame Wikipedia.
With Wikipedia, sources are either cited - or if not, you should know to take it with a pinch of salt. Even if the cited source is wrong (as might happen in the scenario you describe), the point is that that it's attributed to another source. (E.g., if Wikipedia says "X is true [ref]", you read that as shorthand for "ref claims that X is true", and then if you don't trust the ref, that's up to you.)
We ought to be doing that with every other place that presents something without a source (including the media), but for some reason we live in a world where claims from the media, not to mention blog posts and random anonymous comments on Slashdot, are accepted as fact, but when it comes to Wikipedia? Well heaven forbid you trust that - the existence of a single false claim out of millions of articles, for a period of 24 hours, means you can't trust it at all!
(Are people not aware of how many falsehoods are published by the media, and later corrected? Countless times I've seen an obvious blooper on a website, even on places like the BBC. It's later corrected, often after a few hours. Because there's no edit history, all trace of it is lost, but continued editing of articles on media websites is commonplace. Then there's the newspapers where a major story contains an error, which is later apologised for in small column of a later edition...)
If you want to measure the accuracy of Wikipedia, then let's have evidence based on a survey of pages, comparing that to other sources (whether it's the media, or other encyclopedias). Previous such surveys, IIRC, have shown Wikipedia to be almost on par with Britannica (so yeah, not as good, but you get what you pay for, and that hardly makes it unreliable). I fail to see how tabloid-style outrage over single instances trumps that.
Rephrase:
If anyone who knows what they're doing have to waste their time beating their heads against a wall composed of overweight teenagers living in their parents' basements, they're going to give up and go back to the real world every time.
There we go.
The problem with Wikipedia, in a nutshell: clueless morons with no life, no social skills beyond MMORPG-style "how do I game the system to become an admin" playing, and no expertise in anything (least of all writing and grammar) are given the ability not simply to edit, but to ban others from editing.
This is the equivalent of giving someone who's been on cocaine for 20 years a badge, a loaded gun, and telling him to shoot anyone that he thinks might be breaking the law first and ask questions later.
That's nice, but it's missing the whole point.
Well, there appear to be two main points to the article itself: (1) that Wikipedia can be completely inaccurate without further warning; (2) that news media are less accurate than expected because they've taken to deriving their "facts" from any stinking place: for example, Wikipedia.
I blazed through point #1 because I take it for granted, and jumped right to the point that anyone competent to do research in the first place should already be taking point #1 for granted. #2 I didn't address, but you did it, almost:
_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.
Which is exactly what happened to all these newspapers around the world when this guy trolled them through Wikipedia. Wikipedia's own structure concedes that it's probably going to have errors; Wikipedia tells people not to use Wikipedia itself as a citation. The news industry, on the other hand, appears to works on the assumption that its published material is right until proven otherwise; they only use the "we're not perfect" line when they've gotten caught with their pants down. Well, this time, they got caught. Not that one would expect the same level of accuracy from the news industry as what is commonly called a "peer-reviewed journal" — but news media is supposed to be internally reviewed before it gets released. It's the news media's reputation that is getting deflated more by the article, not Wikipedia. And I'd tend to say the same about any "peer-reviewed" journal that managed to get caught up in a Wikipedia hoax experiment.
So, yes, how about we apply the same standard to Wikipedia?
Wikipedia already knows approximately what it's nature is. The problem is alleged journalists or alleged academics, who imagine their research talent to be their stock in trade, but then feel it is appropriate to either perform invasive experiments on Wikipedia or borrow facts from it — either of which means the person doing it didn't even do proper research on his target subject/source (Wikipedia), which is grossly incompetent.
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?
Within the context of this article, there are broadly two safeguards against that: (1) the lesser safeguard, which is lots of other people around who make the information tend to bias towards fact; and (2) the more important safeguard in this context, which is that anyone who does allegedly "proper" research on a daily basis ought to already know that Wikipedia's been tested on this point repeatedly and therefore knows it's not to be used as a sole source.
All parties involved in the article's incident (other than the Wikipedia editors who reverted the errors) seem to have refused to participate in either safeguard. And that was the thrust of my original reply: That the only people competent to do research by manipulating Wikipedia are those who are competent enough to realize it's already been done. While Wikipedia is not an oracle, it involves real people doing work they believe in, who didn't consent to being lab monkeys taking a similar shock every time some experimenter wants to claim their own credit for seeing how the animal really twitches.
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.
The only failure here is in not realizing that, not only does Wikipedia not claim to have come anywhere close to utopia, but that this fact has been easily shown repeatedly. One doesn't need to do another experiment to discover this; it's open information for anyone who bothers to look first.
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.