A friend sends a link to this story by the Associated Press:
DUBLIN (AP) — When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, 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 obituary-friendly 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 twice caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it. A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets they’d swallowed his baloney whole.
Before quoting it, I took the precaution of taking the larger point and checking its source. Since it was about Wikipedia that was easy. The hoax apparently happened, so I went hunting for the particulars. One of the things that Wikipedia does far better than journalism — apart from having “many eyes” to make its bugs shallow, is that it maintains a lineage of its information. For example, the version history of the entry on Maurice Jarre is shown on this page. By treating edits like a database transaction log (which in fact it is), and thereby tracking inserts, edits and deletes, you can ‘play back’ the evolution of a piece of information just like a movie. You can restore to any point in time. This tremendously powerful feature makes Wikipedia, for all its defects architecturally better than the press. You can not only see the hoax entry come and go, it is possible to see how the Wikipedia editors dealt with it.
With all the money available to the mainstream media and broadcast networks during their heyday why did they not do better? Why could they not have implemented a version history? One possible reason was that the media did not want to. Newspapers were not in the information business. They were in the narrative business; and in that profession an editor’s chief ambition is to retain the power to keep his tale in the service of whichever great ideology or personal lord he served. The ability to cast a cloud of forgetfulness over the audience is chief among a bard’s tricks. A version history would allow readers to track the accuracy of journalists and pundits; and in a world where these are directly supported by their readers (by site ad revenues, subscriptions or micropayments) the fabulist or bad analyst will soon be S.O.L.
Can traditional journalism write an expose on itself? Wikipedia is capable of a some sort of self-referential discussion of the Wikipedia Hoax. For a time the hoax had its own entry in Wikipedia. Direct references to the Irish student’s caper have been removed from the latest version of the Jarre entry but it still lives in the discussion page (see the tabs above the Wikipedia entries) behind entry itself. The real problem with the failing journalistic method is architectural. Modern journalists are in some sense no better, information quality wise, than ancient bards; and are often far less dramatic and convincing. The opening lines of Beowulf were a prologue to a tale about monsters, and they were far more arresting than today’s ledes. “President Barack Obama is telling health industry leaders he expects them to deliver on their $2 trillion savings pledge.” That’s about monsters too. Budgetary ones, that is. We live in an age when dragons have grown vast and bards have shrunk to littleness; but be of good cheer: information technology lives!
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20 Comments
1. Bonzo:I’ve had friends, and friends of friends ridicule me for ‘liking’ and linking to Wikipedia. Very few vandals mess with/defame the wiki entry for links like the ‘two body problem’. I do like wikipedia.
May 12, 2009 - 4:44 pm 2. novanglus:At a software conference, a speaker referenced Wikipedia as a source, commenting “a million monkeys typing on the internet couldn’t possibly be wrong.”. So, here’s the test and the score is…
Monkeys on the Internet – 1, Mainstream Media – 0
May 12, 2009 - 5:18 pm 3. RWE:A while back I wanted to use a quote from Shakespeare in an article I was writing. I did not recall which play it was from, but I thought it was Hamlet. So I typed it the way I remembered it into a search engine and let her rip.
I got all kinds of hits with people using that quote exactly as I wrote it down. Trouble was, none of them were Shakespeare experts. So I finally found a suitable reference site and checked there. And I found that I had gotten the quote a bit wrong; it was from Julius Caesar, not Hamlet. But all those other people had not only gotten it wrong but also gotten it wrong the exact same way.
One quote you often hear is Adm Yamamoto’s after the attack on Pearl Harbor, “I fear that we have awakened a sleeping giant….” But on a show on the Discovery Channel several years back it was revealed that the famous quote was a total fabrication made up for the film “Tora, Tora, Tora” in which the admiral never even says that but it is written on the screen, quote style. The film writers defended their fabrication by saying “Well, Yamamoto should have said that.”
Look at the Wikipedia entry for the place I live and it says that we don’t have very many parks. In reality, we not only have as many parks as you would expect, but the whole north end of the island is a National Forest.
I guess we can take some comfort in that neither the mistaken Shakespeare quote nor the Yamamoto fabrication were wrong in terms of reflecting what was expressed by those people. But that is not always the case. There is a lot of crap out there and not all of it is harmless. GIGO!
May 12, 2009 - 5:20 pm 4. bogie wheel:RWE:
If you don’t have a good ole book version of a Shakespeare concordance handy, this ain’t too shabby either.
Sophomore year in college, I took a Shakespeare Histories & Tragedies class from a prof who turned out to be the best teacher I ever had. I did my term paper on the garden imagery in Hamlet. Not knowing that there *was* such a thing as a Shakespeare concordance, I went through the entire play line by line with a fine-toothed comb. Learned the play exceptionally well!
Nowadays of course you can get the ‘puter to count & sort all those magnificent Bard words. Not quite as picturesque as the mental image of the patch-elbowed, ink-blotted guy in coke-bottle glasses hunched over a Shakespeare tome, jotting down every single word on one of his assiduously indexed index cards ….
May 12, 2009 - 5:53 pm 5. bogie wheel:What DO they teach in journalism school, since it obviously isn’t journalism?
(…. Nevermind.)
May 12, 2009 - 5:57 pm 6. Don Abernathey:Trying to discern the truth using the American media (media here is a general term covering print, and TV), is like trying to determine the time from a clock devoid of markings containing only a second hand.
The Internet (Wiki and others) represents lots of clocks, most of which are somewhat usable. And I can get the truth, if I want.
May 12, 2009 - 5:57 pm 7. Alexis:We live in an age when dragons have grown vast and bards have shrunk to littleness
What do you call it when the monster is so big that one doesn’t even notice the monster anymore perhaps because a small portion of that monster’s anatomy becomes one’s habitat? Imagine seeing a massive cave entrance, only to find out that it is really a dragon’s oviduct.
May 12, 2009 - 6:56 pm 8. lc:Excellent post. There is a frequently quoted speech attributed to Chief Seattle which never actually (verifiably) happened – the most often quoted version was one written for a movie. It even fooled Joseph Campbell…from “The Power of Myth”:
http://tinyurl.com/pb39ez
Kind of meme-ish. It certainly emphasizes and supports the narrative, not the facts. One must be an active consumer of information.
May 12, 2009 - 6:58 pm 9. James:As if not seeing the process is bad enough, now online news archives are going down the memory hole: http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2009/05/08/the-career-killers-at-nytimes-com/
Wikipedia suffers too, as it’s linked to 9000 IHT stories. The NY Times have said in this case the migration of iht.com to nytimes.com is still in progress.
May 12, 2009 - 8:04 pm 10. Mad Fiddler:Thus is proved the value of the Book.
Carbon black ink on acid-free paper, perfect binding.
An electronic twitch from a malign publisher will probably be able to order your Kindle™ to re-format its own memory.
Poof.
The moment is not distant when Orwell’s vision of the “nonperson” will be upon us.
May 12, 2009 - 10:46 pm 11. kbdabear:Google cache can fill a lot of memory holes, and The Wayback Machine archive.org has internet content back to the old Netscape days of the 90s
May 13, 2009 - 1:05 am 12. Pseudo-Polymath » Blog Archive » Wednesday Highlights:[...] Another nail in the old journalism coffin. [...]
May 13, 2009 - 6:30 am 13. John Work:It would be interesting to see an Internet-based news site that used the Wikipedia architectual model – where you could track back to original sources and link to verifying or denying information – and to “spin”. And have the database transaction log to trace the development of a given news item. For some of us that would be a very good thing, but I’m guessing that there wouldn’t be a sufficient market to make such a site economically viable. Might be a good application for some data-mining software. I’ve read how these techniques have been used in counter-terrorism with great (but mostly unpublicized) success.
May 13, 2009 - 7:46 am 14. Marcus Aurelius:The model in a perfect world is when a news outfit flubs it, they admit it and correct it.
I recall a story back in the 2004 campaign when President Bush was speaking in Milwaukee and got news on President Clinton’s heart imminent heart surgery. Al-Pazeera (AP) reported when President Bush expressed sincere warm wishes for President Clinton’s full and speedy recovery the crowd booed.
A day or two later in the internet version of that story the report on the boos disappeared, because there were none. There was absolutely no acknowledgment of mistake or explanation of the revision.
With Wiki at least when correcting something there is that history.
May 13, 2009 - 8:43 am 15. Gringo:I have looked at the Wikipedia entry for my high school for several years. There are often “non-informational” changes made to it, such as claiming that XYZ famous actor or athlete is a graduate of the school. Such changes are usually corrected within a short time.
Wikipedia is often not a good source for controversial topics, as their articles are often biased. While the English language Wikipedia articles on the Salvador Allende era in Chile, have a certain bias, they are MUCH less biased than the Spanish language Wikipedia articles on the Allende era. Wikipedia is a good source for finding basic facts- much easier than the WWW overall. And as all is documented, you can check it out. Just like Ol’ Case said.
The journalist’s not picking up on the mistake, contrasted to Wikipedia’s doing so, is a commentary on the competence of many in the journalism profession.
May 13, 2009 - 9:14 am 16. Cowboy:How did the mis-information get to the journalists? The guy put it up on Wikipedia, and journalists are always telling us never to trust Wikipedia, but rely on them, the professionals, so you won’t get burned.
So, how did it move from this source they don’t want you to use into the one they do want you to use?
Could it be that some journalists were researching their story on Wikipedia, the declaimed questionable source, a source they don’t want you to use?
Odd, no?
May 13, 2009 - 11:38 am 17. Marie Claude:Cowboy, this wasn’t a major information, that’s may-be they only look for Wikipedia
May 13, 2009 - 12:47 pm 18. Jeffrey -- New York:Do you want a really good example of the inability of journalism to correct itself? There is none better than the alleged looting of the Iraq National Museum after the fall of Baghdad in April, 2003.
Journalists on the scene breathlessly announced to the world that the entire museum (100%) had been cleaned out. Reality? 2%.
Iraq Antiquities Revisited.
It took several months before the truth came out, but most media outlets never retracted or corrected their original claims.
I like John Work’s idea of a Wikipedia-type model for internet-based news. Imagine how different this story would have been if that structure had been used.
*
May 13, 2009 - 12:52 pm 19. RWE:Bogie Wheel: Yes, thanks, that is a good link. Looks to be better than the one I found, not that I have any idea what the URL was for that one.
Jeffrey: Yes! Good one! And even Bill O’Reily excoriated the U.S. Military on the looting of the museums – and I don’t think he retracted his remarks, either.
I recall talking to a geologist back in the early 80’s about the ominous Palmdale Bulge being reported in the press at the time. Supposedly they had detected a rising of the ground out in the Calif desert that indicated an impending earthquake, or something. The geologist replied that it was all nonsense – the instrumentation they were using did not even have that kind of accuracy. And sure enough, some months later an article in the LA Times offhandedly said that was what “the Bulge” really was – instrumentation error. Of course, even that admission was on Page 23 or some such, not in headlines across the front page.
May 13, 2009 - 1:48 pm 20. Marcus Aurelius:I’ve done a little Wiki editing. I can not recall the guy right now, but on the bio page of the guy who composed a lot of the music for NFL films a description of his music was a little too editorial in nature, so I cut that out and kept it strictly to the facts. Plus I have done some editing regarding local politics.
I agree with #15 Gringo, if the topic isn’t controversial then the Wiki is not a bad source, if the topic is controversial then expect the Wiki to be unstable and subject to vandalism and sychophancy.
#19 RWE, Bill O’Reilly is a twit and it doesn’t surprise me he got caught up in that. My beef against Bill O’Reilly is neatly summarized in his motto “Looking out for the little guy”. The little guy can look out for himself, did not ask for Bill’s help, and it is often the lefty that always portends to look out for the little guy.
May 13, 2009 - 5:36 pmSorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.