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How Spurious Wikipedia Edits Can Attach a Name To a Scandal, 35 Years On

Posted by timothy on from the same-complaint-that-the-dracula-family-has dept.

Andreas Kolbe (2591067) writes For more than six years, Wikipedia named an innocent man as a key culprit in the 1978/79 Boston College point shaving scandal. The name Joe Streater was inserted into Wikipedia by an anonymous user in August 2008. The unsourced insertion was never challenged or deleted, and over time, Streater became widely associated with the scandal through newspaper and TV reports as well as countless blogs and fan sites, all of which directly or indirectly copied this spurious fact from Wikipedia. Yet research shows that Streater, whose present whereabouts are unknown, did not even play in the 1978/79 season. Before August 2008, his name was never mentioned in connection with the scandal. As journalists have less and less time for in-depth research, more and more of them seem to be relying on Wikipedia instead, and the online encyclopedia is increasingly becoming a vector for the spread of spurious information.

5 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Journalists have less time... by maliqua · · Score: 5, Informative

    developing the complex work of fiction they want to portray as news, it takes some time to make an elaborate and convincing lie

  2. Wikipedia is sometimes wrong by floobedy · · Score: 4, Informative

    As an experiment, I added a spurious and incorrect fact to an obscure wikipedia article, complete with a reference to a document which did not support the claim. It took years before my edit was noticed and reversed.

    This only works with obscure articles. The more obscure the article, the less it's checked. If you try inserting something spurious into the page on Obama it will be reversed in about 5 minutes.

    1. Re:Wikipedia is sometimes wrong by BasilBrush · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's not an experiment, that's vandalism.

  3. Re:Journalists? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    The content is obviously left leaning. But it's well researched and quite professional. AFAIK, there's no journalistic ethic that says you need to publish articles for conservative interests along with those for liberal interests.

    I also like the Financial Times, which is generally conservative (not American Conservative, but conservative nonetheless). And they do decent reporting as well. I also read the South China Morning Post.

    Grow up.

  4. Which is why Wikipedia is better by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    In the good old days, people also wrote nonsense and published it and it was repeated over and over until everyone accepted it as the truth (the story of George Washington and the cherry tree is an example familiar to most Americans). Wikipedia is no different, except that it has an audit trail: now you can see where and when a specific statement came from. With older media, this is seldom possible.