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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.'"
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
Okay, let me get this straight: you accuse mainstream journalists of failing to check their facts and a lack of objectivity ... and then you use bloggers as an example of how to correct these problems?
No, you've entirely missed my point. My point is that bloggers do a far more entertaining job of non-objective journalism than the MSM, and the MSM's level of fact checking (*and* hard-hitting investigative journalism) has recently fallen to to level of bloggers - or below!
If the MS wants to survive, it needs to do what blggers are bad at. There's no longer any value in mere distribution, and the first-hand reporting of news will predominately be live-blogging by random people who happen to be on the scene, before much longer. In theory, the MSM could be adding reliable fact checking, and neutral-POV context, to this raw reportage.
In practice they simply aren't - they're merely culling the raw data down to whatever supports their idiological position, and running with it unchecked. And blogs are far better at that!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I think things are changing. I think the popularity of the [citation needed] meme is an indication of this: even 10 years ago on the internet people would not ask for citations nearly as often as they do now, which shows people who are online at least are paying more attention to where things come from.
A week or so ago, I was in a cafe, and a ~40 year old teacher was explaining loudly to her companions how the internet is changing the way we know things (and how she was uncomfortable with it).
These days every high school or college student knows about Wikipedia, and they all know it is unreliable. It is only one step from realizing that one source is unreliable to realizing that many things are unreliable, and Wikipedia is opening the door for many people to this line of thought. This is a good thing.
Qxe4
Long proven to be a skewed small-scale study carried out by biased researchers.
Proven where? What part of the results were skewed? Why do you believe the researchers were biased? A number of people were involved, including Roald Hoffmann and Michael Gordin. Are you saying they were biased as well?
They've published a list of the errors they found, so if you disagree you can go over the list and verify. Also of note is that there was an error in nearly every Britannica article they checked.
Let's not mention this study again, other than to ridicule it.
Why? It seems to be good research. Here is Nature's rebuttal to Britannica's arguments. Also, there you will find Britannica's argument itself. Read it, I think you will agree that the study seems to have been performed well.
Qxe4
I had this exact problem.
It was a trivial fact, a submarine was listed as having four times the horsepower it really contained, since there were four engines some fuzzy math took place and this submarine just under four times more powerful than it's direct successor.
The problem was the fact stood for years, I worked at a museum which actually had one of these submarines, Among my sources were A, the number written on the engines, and B, Dead tree books and manuals clearly stating the engine size.
My vandalism was taken down because this fact stood so long it couldn't be false, I said it wasn't cited, how can you prove me wrong, He quickly found citation, hundreds of sites got their stats info from wikipedia, and as we all know "The Internet" is a more trustworthy souce than a real navy manual any day of the week.
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!