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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.

40 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Research by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As journalists have less and less inclination and ability for in-depth research

    FTFY

    1. Re:Research by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Get used to modern reporting. The less people are willing to pay for news, the more news a reporter has to produce each day to cover their salary.

      There is no free lunch.

      Get used to the positive feedback loop where people are less likely to pay for the news reporters generate because it's low grade crap. There is no free lunch.

      P.S. apologists for these journalists should advocate the journalists going full blown tabloid. Satan's face seen in oil fire, etc.

    2. Re:Research by znrt · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Also inaccurate, (snip) The less people are willing to pay for news, the more news a reporter has to produce each day to cover their salary.

      There is no free lunch.

      also inaccurate. how many stories has a reporter to produce to cover the salary of an executive in the media industry?

      fire the executive, hire 50-70 reporters. voilà: professional journalism in every story.

    3. Re:Research by west · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I know the popular narrative: It's somebody else's fault: greedy executives! greedy politicians! greedy everybody else but me!

      But I find that that I can trace many ills back to where they probably belong: me and my ilk.

      I want my news for free, and am unwilling to pay what it costs for pure hard news coverage. It was all nice when classified ads happened to pay for much of for my news fix, and paper subscribers the rest, but since they stopped subsidising my mooching, I don't feel I have the right to expect other people to work for free, just because I'm too cheap and would rather spend my money elsewhere.

      I'm not going to tell other people they need to take a pay cut for my benefit when I'm not willing to fork over the $30 or $40 a month that is what's needed from millions of people for proper coverage.

      No one is eating my lunch. It just isn't free.

    4. Re:Research by mwvdlee · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Right. Just like software developers get all the time in the world from their employers to make secure and bug free products, but they simple don't have any inclination and ability to do so.

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    5. Re:Research by sconeu · · Score: 3, Insightful

      For years, I had a paid subscription to the dead-tree LA Times. As the years progressed, the reporting became worse and worse, until the "reporting" was useless. (yes, the quotes missing on the first instance are deliberate).

      I contributed my money to pay their salaries. Guess what? When it devolved into repeating press releases or cloning Wikipedia? I stopped paying.

      --
      General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
    6. Re:Research by znrt · · Score: 2

      I know the popular narrative: It's somebody else's fault: greedy executives! greedy politicians! greedy everybody else but me!

      you are not listening.
      http://www.businessinsider.com...

      the reporters' salary is but an anecdotical tiny fraction of any news suscription you pay. this renders your entire argument pointless because your measures are meaningless.

    7. Re:Research by knightghost · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    8. Re:Research by easyTree · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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?

      --
      Requiem for the American Dream
    9. Re:Research by penix1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      to find that the audience prefers misinfotainment over news. They demand entertainment over learning. Illusion over reality.

      I am old enough to remember a day when the news was actually just that... News.... No opinion mixed in. Just the facts. When opinion was offered, usually after the real news, it was labeled as such.

      Then media consolidation happened, the fairness doctrine was tossed and newsrooms nationwide were expected to turn a profit. It is that, not the audience, that caused the decline of in-depth reporting. It is expensive to actually check all the facts in a story. It takes time, money and more importantly sources willing to put the story out. In trying to compete with the Internet, broadcast TV and newspapers nationwide have a tough time beating the net to "the scoop". Lastly, corporations (read "advertisers") are the real ones dictating what the audience sees. You will never see a story about an advertiser because that would be biting the hand that feeds them.

      I argue the last in-depth reporting really only happened when the Vietnam war brought the horrors of war to people's living room and the Watergate scandal opened people's eyes to government corruption. Since then, the government learned the lesson and wiped out all trace of regulation of what is supposed to be the watchdog of government itself.

      --
      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.
    10. Re:Research by lgw · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What, a time before Crocknight lied every night about the Vietnam War because he wanted us out of it? Before the a CIA agent who wanted Nixon out used a of couple newspaper reporters as tools to accomplish his political agenda? Before 5 steady years of wartime propaganda to keep morale up on the home front? Before the press conspired to hide the fact the president was a Polio victim who couldn't walk? Was there ever actually a golden age when the press wasn't just politics? I doubt it. Oh, the political agenda changes from generation to generation, but that's about it.

      The only part of the paper you can believe is the sports section. I doubt it's ever been different.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    11. Re:Research by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Honestly, I don't believe it's possible - or at best, unbelievably difficult - for someone to present information without bias. In terms of political coverage especially, I'd wager the chances dwindle down much closer to zero. If you don't notice a bias, then you're either not paying attention, or perhaps are in general agreement with the bias being shown, and as such, it tends to appear "neutral" to you (i.e. 'hey, that's just common sense, right?').

      There's bias in choosing how to label things in stories, and there's bias in which stories are reported and which stories are not. For instance, if you typically only report scandals of political opponents but not your own favored party, even if you're only reporting the facts, there's still a bias there. I do think the bias in reporting used to be less overt than today, but I think it's always been there to some extent. Human nature doesn't change so easily.

      The fairness doctrine perhaps made sense in a day when our information choices were limited (I'd still argue against it in principle, as I think it stomps all over the first amendment). But we live in the information age, and no one can seriously claim that a person doesn't have access to a wide range of differing political commentary from a vast network of different sources - not just traditional media, but new media as well. Much of it shallow and repeated, true, but we have access to much more of the raw information in more of a peer to peer fashion, and don't have to rely on what the traditional media is reporting.

      I'm not quite old enough to remember the Vietnam and Watergate years, but I certainly do remember the pre-internet media days. For all it's faults, I'll take today's information age any day, even if the mass media has fallen quite a bit in stature and relevance. What we've gained, IMO, more than makes up for it.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    12. Re:Research by penix1 · · Score: 2

      I do think the bias in reporting used to be less overt than today, but I think it's always been there to some extent. Human nature doesn't change so easily.

      There is a big difference between bias and pure opinion. Today opinion is quite often reported as fact. It is the difference between what is reported (bias) and how it is reported (opinion).

      The fairness doctrine perhaps made sense in a day when our information choices were limited (I'd still argue against it in principle, as I think it stomps all over the first amendment).

      I am having difficulty understanding how giving opposing views on an issue or news item in any way hinders free speech. If anything it enhances it giving the intended audience a broader understanding of an issue. Without it echo chambers such as Fox News and MSNBC exist in a vacuum polarizing even further their respective audience.

      I'm not quite old enough to remember the Vietnam and Watergate years, but I certainly do remember the pre-internet media days. For all it's faults, I'll take today's information age any day, even if the mass media has fallen quite a bit in stature and relevance. What we've gained, IMO, more than makes up for it.

      I have no problem with the Internet when it is used properly. But as is often the case, too much trust is placed in what is on the net and these days critical thinking skills isn't in great supply. The Internet has caused traditional media to compete with something they can't compete with. Namely instant content creation. This story is just one example of an error on the net going unrecognized by both professional and lay observers. That is the pitfall of the open Internet. Do I want it to change or to go back to a disconnected world? That answer would be a resounding no. But I wish people would take what is on it with a grain of salt and realize that it isn't definitive.

      --
      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.
    13. Re:Research by west · · Score: 2

      It's no one's fault, really, it's just that newspapers are obsolete.

      I'd in general agree.

      Unfortunately, low reportage is correlated with a mass of social ills (increase corruption for one), so I suspect this development is not welfare-improving in the long run.

      On the other hand, we do save a few bucks each month.

    14. Re:Research by ultranova · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Unfortunately, low reportage is correlated with a mass of social ills (increase corruption for one), so I suspect this development is not welfare-improving in the long run.

      Except that newspapers, having long since been consolidated into massive cartels, don't have any interest in reporting social ills, since the owners of those cartels benefit from the status quo. Why would I pay Murdoch for his propaganda?

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

  2. And the culprit is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    1. Re:And the culprit is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What a shock. The "Encyclopedia that anyone can edit!" is regularly edited to have biased, incorrect, or even libelous information.
      And then everyone is shocked when lazy people treat Wikipedia as an actual vetted information source.

    2. Re:And the culprit is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:And the culprit is by Mashiki · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Om, nomnomnom...
    4. Re:And the culprit is by BasilBrush · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Back in 2005, Wikipedia was studied for accuracy against the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And they were found to be about the same. Since then Wikipedia has improved a lot, and they've stopped printing the Encyclopedia Britannica.

      Whilst Wikipedia can suffer from malicious or prankerster edits, it's balanced out by the fact that it's up to date, and a printed encyclopedia is always years out of date. Even when a new edition comes out, most articles won't have been touched.

      Wikipedia could be improved, and the problem to tackle is anonymity. There's really no good reason for allowing anonymous edits. It's not a free speech issue. After that, one could work on ensuring that the editors who adopt certain pages as their own are actually qualified to be reasonably knowledgable about that thing, and not just the people most prepared to jump in and edit most often.

    5. Re:And the culprit is by HiThere · · Score: 2

      The problems are worse, but it has better coverage of Sailor Moon.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    6. Re:And the culprit is by Andreas+Kolbe · · Score: 2

      Back in 2005, Wikipedia was studied for accuracy against the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And they were found to be about the same. Since then Wikipedia has improved a lot, and they've stopped printing the Encyclopedia Britannica.

      The 2005 "study" comparing Britannica and Wikipedia was not a rigorous peer-reviewed study, and they only looked at articles on relatively obscure science topics – a fact that no one seems to remember these days. The average Wikipedia vandal would not even know how to find an entry on a topic like the “kinetic isotope effect” or “Meliaceae” (two of the articles they looked at).

      The assertion that Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica is ludicrous. Granted, it's a lot bigger than Britannica, and has articles on breaking news stories, but as reliable? Of the English Wikipedia's nearly 5 million articles, at least 10% are on no Wikipedia editor's watchlist – a result of the continuous increase in the number of articles combined with the continuous decrease in the number of active editors – and those articles are sitting ducks for subtle vandalism.

      Britannica may have had errors, but it did not contain false information inserted by anonymous people for fun or for financial gain; it contained no anonymous hatchet jobs written by people's rivals, and was not full of puff-pieces written by the biography subjects themselves.

      Repeating this false "Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica" meme only contributes to future cases like this one here, or this one.

  3. Journalists have less time... by bazmail · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...because they're busy doing what?

    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. Re:Journalists have less time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "...because they're busy doing what?"

      ebola. ebola. EBOLA!

    3. Re:Journalists have less time... by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2

      ...because they're busy doing what?

      Collecting unemployment checks.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    4. Re:Journalists have less time... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:Journalists have less time... by real+gumby · · Score: 5, Interesting

      ...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.

    6. Re:Journalists have less time... by real+gumby · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If you want evidence that current journalism is worse than previous generations, just look at the number of absurd hoaxes that get reported as fact. Back when it took a little effort to gather information, people took it more seriously.

      There have always been hoaxes, small and large. I'm just saying I haven't seen any study (though I would hope such a study exists) showing if the quality has gone up or down or is unchanged. My comment (and yours) are simply anecdote.

      A sense of declinism (things were better "in the old days") has been a recurring theme for millennia.

  4. Journalists? by Seumas · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Journalists? by fustakrakich · · Score: 2

      Nobody does any investigative journalism anymore.

      What's the incentive? The whole world is on this *kill the messenger* bent. What does honest reporting get you? A lot of grief, that's what. It sure doesn't pay the rent...

      --
      “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
    2. 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.

    3. Re:Journalists? by Seumas · · Score: 2

      There would seem to be few benefits to bothering with actual investigative journalism, anymore and a lot of negatives.

      One problem is that it is simply easier *not to*.

      If you watch media closely enough you will see countless "news stories" that are not only covering the same topic and doing so from the same perspective, but using the same catch phrases and identical story titles and blurbs. There are so many places out there (the government not the least of which) who will gladly provide you with free pre-packaged content that you just attach yourself to the by-line of and your job is done. Not only is your job done, but you've earned a kudo from the homeland.

      Then there are pre-packaged pieces from pharmaceutical companies and various political organizations or activist groups. And there are plenty of pieces that are pre-packaged and then you're paid to run the pieces as if they were actual news (these are usually very easy to spot and seem like a daily part of the national morning shows on the big three networks as well as local evening news).

      Not to mention the time involved. We live in a world where being wrong fifty times is better than being late fifty times. In the time you took to come up with an idea, investigate it, properly source it, write it, have it edited, and then published it -- everyone else has put up a hundred new pieces of news. They're more productive than you. They generated more content. They served more eyeballs. Those eyeballs looked at more ads.

      It's better to just copy someone else's work (either through the packages I mentioned, talking points being issued out -- remember that what's his name at NewsCorp is famous for setting the company news-reporting party-line, or just through outright jotting down a story based on all the other news stories and blog posts you've read that morning). You don't even have to give attribution or source it.

      As a result, we live in a world where you can say anything, push any biased lines, push any paid agendas (or push agendas simply because it's easier than producing your own content), and you never have to say that you're sorry when you're wrong. No matter the consequences. And nobody is ever held accountable for what they *don't* report, anymore. And "people familiar with the matter" and "sources say" and "it was reported" are now considered "sources". Who can doubt what you *do* report with vetted sources, like that? (Or the nasty trick we like to pull where we, as a government, plant an article in the Zimbabwe Evening Journal and then count that as a source when we go to report on whatever bullshit we're spinning, locally).

      By the way, your comment seems to imply a bit of "hey, excuse the journalists - it's not their fault" in it. While I agree that there is more to lose by doing investigative journalism than by just going along with the miserable degradation of it, let's not forget that the ranks are now filling with a whole generation of the people that tell us they would rather spend on-the-clock time on facebook, twitter, and instagram and expect to be the EIC of the WSJ by the time they've had time to frame their degree, lest they feel they've been cheated, somehow.

      Having had the fortune to know a great many journalists (some of them truly legitimate journalists and some of them from the old-school vanguard that held their responsibility in high esteem), I think it is safe to ultimately conclude that it is a mix of the two. It is one part completely corrupted and failed system at every level and one part non-principled copy-and-pasters more interested in putting on romantic airs of the journalist gig than putting in the work and taking the risk of it.

      I'd be lying if I said I had a god damn clue how to fix any of it.

  5. A key part of the solution... by MikeRT · · Score: 2

    Would be defamation laws. They need to be vigorously enforced. False information like this is actually criminal in many jurisdictions. It's time that crap like this gets the submitter pummeled in court instead of "duh duh freedom of speech."

  6. Citogenesis! by Jeremi · · Score: 2

    Seems legit

    --


    I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  7. 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.

    2. Re:Wikipedia is sometimes wrong by NoMaster · · Score: 2

      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

      No, it works with non-controversial subjects. Pick an article on a subject that's not obscure and also not particularly controversial - for example, common household substances, typical garden flowers, etc. - and read a few of the citations.

      You'll be surprised how many don't support - or, in some cases, don't even relate to - the associated statement in the Wikipedia article. Most of it is stuff that is "common knowledge" that is false - but some authors/editors are so sure of its truth that they cite anything vaguely related to back up the common belief.

      --
      What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
    3. Re:Wikipedia is sometimes wrong by Animats · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

      Exactly. As one of the people who spends time cleaning up stuff like that, it's seriously annoying. Fortunately, the tools for automatic jerk identification are improving.

      The paid editors are even worse. But they have a recognizable editing pattern; they write PR-type prose. Self-promotion on Wikipedia used to be mostly from garage bands. Now it's more corporate. (Also, the self-promoting garage bands have been replaced by self-promoting DJs.)

  8. 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.