In the Irish Times, Shane Fitzgerald explains how he planteda fictitious quote on the Maurice Jarre's Wikipedia page as soon has he learned the French composer died. The student wanted to test how far his unsourced hoax would go.
The fallout says a lot about the influence of Wikipedia and the responsibility it has to somhow keep a credible open-source encyclopedia. Fitzgerald writes:
I knew that as soon as newspaper reporters around the world heard about Jarre’s death, the first thing they would do was go on to his Wikipedia page and gather information to quickly throw together a fitting obituary for the following day’s paper.
While I expected online blogs and maybe some smaller papers to use the quote, I did not think it would have a major impact. I was wrong. Quality newspapers in England, India, America and as far away as Australia had my words in their reports of Jarre’s death. I was shocked that highly respected newspapers would use material from Wikipedia without first sourcing and referencing it properly.
The issues about the media and quality reporting that this experiment raises requires a whole new article by itself – because the implications are far-reaching. If I could so easily falsify the news across the globe, even to this small extent, then it is unnerving to think about what other false information may be reported in the press.
One month later, the falsified quotes have been removed from Wikipedia and Fitzgerald only recently notified the various news services who were taken in by the deception. The best reaction was from Siobhain Butterworth, the readers' editor at The Guardian:
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.
Maybe now you can better understand concerns about Wikipedia bias towards Israel which I blogged earlier this week.
