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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.

28 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 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.

    7. 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
    8. 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.

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    9. 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.
    10. 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.

      --
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    11. 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?

      --

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  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.

      --
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    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.

  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 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.

    3. 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.

    4. 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 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.

  5. 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 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.)

  6. 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.