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 Posted: Tue May 12, 2009 7:56 am
Irish student hoaxes world's media with fake quote
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK, Associated Press Writer - Tue May 12, 2009 8:57AM EDT
DUBLIN - When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.
His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.
The sociology major's made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.
They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.
A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began.
"I was really shocked at the results from the experiment," Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.
"I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," he said. "It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."
So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version — or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.
"One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack," Fitzgerald's fake Jarre quote read. "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."
Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources — none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.
When he saw British 24-hour news channels reporting the death of the triple Oscar-winning composer, Fitzgerald sensed what he called "a golden opportunity" for an experiment on media use of Wikipedia.
He said it took him less than 15 minutes to fabricate and place a quote calculated to appeal to obituary writers without distorting Jarre's actual life experiences.
If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source — and even might trigger alarms as "too good to be true." But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.
Wikipedia spokesman Jay Walsh said he appreciated the Dublin student's point, and said he agreed it was "distressing so see how quickly journalists would descend on that information without double-checking it."
"We always tell people: If you see that quote on Wikipedia, find it somewhere else too. He's identified a flaw," Walsh said in a telephone interview from Wikipedia's San Francisco base.
But Walsh said there were more responsible ways to measure journalists' use of Wikipedia than through well-timed sabotage of one of the site's 12 million listings. "Our network of volunteer editors do thankless work trying to provide the highest-quality information. They will be rightly perturbed and irritated about this," he said.
Fitzgerald stressed that Wikipedia's system requiring about 1,500 volunteer "administrators" and the wider public to spot bogus additions did its job, removing the quote three times within minutes or hours. It was journalists eager for a quick, pithy quote that was the problem.
He said the Guardian was the only publication to respond to him in detail and with remorse at its own editorial failing. Others, he said, treated him as a vandal.
"The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source," said the readers' editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.
Walsh said this was the first time to his knowledge that an academic researcher had placed false information on a Wikipedia listing specifically to test how the media would handle it.
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Posted: Tue May 12, 2009 8:40 am
One again furthering the reason I don't listen to the media or read newspapers, they print more lies and fiction than truth.
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Posted: Tue May 12, 2009 2:32 pm
I just dont read them because there boring
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Posted: Wed May 13, 2009 4:01 am
Well of course the media prints fiction. It happens all the time. The question is whether or not you the viewer choose to listen to them wholeheartedly or take it with a grain of salt. As much as we'd like to think that they're completely wrong, they really aren't. There's usually a grain of truth somewhere in there.
Moral of the story = Don't use Wikipedia. For anything.
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Posted: Wed May 13, 2009 3:05 pm
 I'm quite well assuming that the tale was only printed in UK papers, as I read them every day [US] but never saw the fake quote, unfortunately. :p
And to also be perfectly honest, I had a hard time sifting through your Post so I found a simplified story online concerning the matter, haha.
I didn't know of Wikipedia until my teachers told me to never use or cite it for reports and projects. I use the site fairly often for fashion and culture information, personal learnins'."If your stomach feels weak my work here is DONE."
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Posted: Wed May 13, 2009 7:23 pm
Wikipedia is actually a very good sorce, everytime a post is made a mod is alerted and checks it to make sure it's true. problem is: that check can take a few days and by then people may have seen it. (the solution, don't make new posts viewable untill they are verified!)
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Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 3:50 pm
Wikipedia isn't a credible source.
If you listed that on a bibliography, your teacher would just laugh at you while writing a big '0' in red pen on your paper.
It is very useful, though.
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Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 4:52 pm
Yer wikipedia really sucks, I prefer actually books for information.
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little_evil_goth Vice Captain
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Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 3:19 am
How ridiculous is it that in school we're taught NOT to rely on wikipedia without finding the same information on a credible source.
But it points out just how reliant people are on modern technology so much so they jump on the closest resource and hold it up as fact. I challenge anything and everything I hear pretty much. It doesn't matter where it comes form everyone is capable of lying and pulling a prank.
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Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 1:20 pm
Yes, teachers are right just like Soryiu is always right.
Out of curiosity I looked up some characters and books I knew well. Nearly every page had a detail or seven incorrect or poorly phrased. At best Wikipedia can give you a general idea or something. For any specifics, the links at the bottem are better.
There is a Wiki-like website called scholarpedia.org that has professionally written articles that are watched over like they were gold. It's smaller and only in English, though. =/
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Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 2:25 pm
Soryiu Fear Loops Wikipedia isn't a credible source. If you listed that on a bibliography, your teacher would just laugh at you while writing a big '0' in red pen on your paper. It is very useful, though. and teachers are alwayse right! (sarcasm) I have a teacher who gives me zeros because I'm not a christian..... bah. I know that they aren't. And to be honest, I'm really not sure that I believe that. But if it's true, then you should have said something to someone about it a long time ago and have gotten her fired for discrimination.
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