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

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.

Comments

And the culprit is

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia. The journalist with "less and less time" are never to blame.

Re:And the culprit is

[Anonymous Coward]

I've lied on Wikipedia, but only one time, and in a harmless-fun manner (normally I'm only produtive and helpful). It was about a thing that's virtually unknown where I live. They had a list of what the object in question is called in different languages, and I added an entry for my language which means basically "WhatTheHeckIsThis?" Because so many sources copy Wikipedia, now whenever I search for the "WhatTheHeckIsThis" term on Google Images, I find tons of pictures of the object in question - from people selling them, people discussing them, etc. Imagine searching on say ebay and seeing someone advertise something as a "WhatTheHeckIsThis?" in your language. lol.

Sorry..... I know, one shouldn't lie to Wikipedia. But someone will notice it eventually, get a good laugh, correct it, and no harm done. Unless the joke goes too far, wherein one day I may walk into a store and see the object in question being sold and listed as a "WhatTheHeckIsThis?", having been marketed as that by a foreign seller or a fellow countryman who found the joke funny. Which also would be great, lol.

Re:And the culprit is

[Mashiki]

Wikipedia is full of factual inaccuracies, it gets even worse the closer you come to articles on politics or popular culture. Then the neutrality goes right out the window because someone, somewhere is always carrying an agenda. I think my current favorite is the #gamergate article where the founder of wikipedia has stepped in because a particular subset of users and ultra-leftwing feminists skewed the neutrality so badly that even he could spot it. Couple that with a particular senior editor having done nearly 25% of the edits and breaking the neutrality rule, it's now led him down the path where people on both sides of the spectrum want him stripped of the ability to edit at all.

Journalists?

[Seumas]

Nobody does any investigative journalism anymore. They take press releases, talking-points, and pre-packaged bits from government agencies and NGOs and tag them with an open and close bit by a local anchor and that's it.

Look at your average idiot on Tumblr. That is the quality of the average "journalist". Actually, pick a random Tumblr user and they probably *are* a "journalist".

Also, so what? We've already decided you can say whatever you want about whoever you want on the internet and that's okay. No recourse. Look at Rip Off Report or Yelp or that site that "shames" ex boyfriends. If all of that is fair game, why shouldn't wikipedia be?

Re:Journalists?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of journalists doing good investigate journalism. Look at Pro Publica.

It's just the old-guard media organizations--ABC, The Washington Post, etc--that have cut back. The American public was blessed for 40 years in that the large media outlets did pretty decent investigative journalism. Far from perfect and unbiased, but still rather good. It was an anomaly. Now we're back to the way things were for nearly 200 years in terms of the commercial media. But with sites like Pro Publica, etc, at least the journalism is still being done, it's just not being spoon fed to the citizenry like it was during the latter half of the 20th century.

Warning: Pro Publica is a site for leftists posing as journalists.

Re:Journalists have less time...

[Richard_at_work]

Doing nothing. Having less time doesn't necessarily mean they have more to do, it can also mean that turnaround times have been drastically reduced - while 20 years ago a journalist had until the evening news or the late edition print run (or early edition) to break a news story, with everyone else working on the same basis, today you have people checking news sites hourly, getting push updates, and a lot more discussion going on. Minutes can matter to news networks these days, as its the difference between breaking it first or second.

Re:Journalists have less time...

[real gumby]

...because they're busy doing what?

At first I read this comment as throwaway snark about listicles and the like, but then it raised for me a pretty interesting question:what evidence do we have that current reporting is less rigourous than it was in the past?.

I recently looked up the newspaper from the day after I was born and found it full of trivial stuff (except my birth announcement of course!) and articles that looked like they uncritically repeated what one source had told them. I am not sure the quality of reporting, in reality, was ever any better than now.

Re:Research

[knightghost]

I would go a layer deeper to see what drives lowering journalist integrity... to find that the audience prefers misinfotainment over news. They demand entertainment over learning. Illusion over reality.

Re:Research

[easyTree]

Perhaps someone should make a few Wikipedia edits to implant the recently-discovered fact that 'journalists are generally lazy'. How long would it be before these implants are referenced?