Amusing Wikipedia prank

[Agent Intellect]

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Irish-student-hoaxes-worlds-apf-15201451.html?.v=1

as if there wasn't enough stuff we can't trust these days already.

[severus]

Oh Wikipedia, how I love thee.
--
Such lovely insight into journalism these days. And they wonder why we don't trust them.

[Felan]

Fascinating read, thanks for that. In part I think it is reflective of the (human) world experiencing growing pains.

[Venture]

I used to think about false information on wikipedia too.

I don't really find it as amusing though.

[Ermine]

Part angering and part amazing. Angering that someone would post something totally false on a website with a reputation for reliability, but amazing that someone would stand up and make the media take notice and reexamine themselves.

[flow]

this is why I fear the fall of newspapers..journalistic integrity is dying!

[Artifice Orisit]

Does historical accuracy at such a trivial level really matter?

I think this just shows that we take our perceptions of validity for granted; that perhaps there is some sort of lesson about existentialism to be learnt from this.

Humans use fuzzy logic to understand the world and as a result our perception of truth can never be anything more than an educated guess.

[Tyria]

I'm glad at least one newspaper stood up to the plate and took responsibility. It's a shame the others got defensive and didn't acknowledge their fault in the process of fact checking in journalism.

[truthseeker72]

The media, at least in my lifetime, has never been terribly concerned about reporting the truth. Rather, news outlets have always sought to accomplish two goals: i) adance an ideology; and ii) generate ad revenue.

[Tyria]

Another goal of current news outlets:

Report about things that aren't really newsworthy.


I miss the days when the news was about... the news. I dislike reading tabloids and gossip; really good stories are not made that way (IMHO). There are more important things to cover that aren't being talked about.

[Ermine]

@ Truthseeker: Which is sad because I bet there are enough people looking for the truth that one could make revenue by telling the truth, now that the truth is a rare commodity.

[truthseeker72]

Ermine:

Wikipedia's popularity tells us that a large segment of the population still values truth. After all, Wikipedia's administrators deleted the ficticious quote twice.

[Kianara]

Great link, very interesting read.

It is indeed troubling that such a thing can be done and nobody would have noticed in the journalism world. In school, Wikipedia is at the top of the list for unreliable sources. After this, I have to wonder if the news articles that we are allowed to cite as a source are as reliable as good old Wikipedia.

[Melkor]

Wonderful.

I've never trusted the press...Except maybe the times..but thats a clever and large paper, which tends to be totally unbiased about everyhting.

[severus]

In school, Wikipedia is at the top of the list for unreliable sources. After this, I have to wonder if the news articles that we are allowed to cite as a source are as reliable as good old Wikipedia.
Yes, I hate how we're not allowed to use Wikipedia! At least their info is being double-checked.

[Venture]

Think most of the stuff is quite easy to tell if it legitimate.
But of course not all.

[quitejaded]

Heh... one day I'm gonna be a sociologist.

[snowqueen]

well Wikipedia has done something right. (http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/05/29/wikipedia-bans-church-of-scientology/)

[Razare]

The reason wikipedia is so great is because it is malleable, if it had to be 100% accurate, it would cost 100 times more to maintain the content that they do. You sacrifice 1 or 2 percent of accuracy for the product being offered for free, which is well worth it.

If you open up an old encyclopedia, it's full of errors and falsities because the world changes. The world changes faster than anything can accurately update the database of information. Their current system seems to be the best method so far because errors are eventually corrected and it offers a wider variety of content than those old encyclopedias used to.

[Enne]

>=( Dammit that was MY idea!