Irish student hoaxes world's media with fake quote

Irish student hoaxes world's media with fake quote

tech.yahoo.com

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.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Yet another reason to doubt Wikipedia as a single source.

My advice always provide at least two erudite sources.
This could be described as a "Hoax of Words." Glad the chap came forward. Another reason to question everything.

And the old adage:

"Don't believe ANYTHING you hear (read) and only HALF of what you see.

Regards......KK




tech.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

[edit on 12-5-2009 by kinda kurious]

Already posted: www.abovetopsecret.com...

Sorry to be pedantic here but...

This kid studying journalism doesn't know how to correctly use a comma ?

"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."

Not only is that really poor considering his field of choice but the people(presumable also journalists, working for papers like "The Guardian") seemed to have quoted that too without noticing that obvious grammar error.

>,<

meh... actually this might be acceptable if it aids the prosody when reading. Still... I think serial commas look stupid. :p

[edit on 5/12/09 by mortalengine]

reply to post by mortalengine


lol, but why would anyone in the media use wikipedia, what thats something colbert uses to make jokes.

reply to post by Maxmars


Sorry, I searched for the term "Wikipedia" in the ATS search box. That thread did not turn up.

Move or delete as you see fit.

It's the story of my life.....Always a day late, and a dollar short.
(Sorry, I don't know who coined that phrase.)

EDIT TO ADD: Green Eyed Leo alerted me to a very old thread I had posted way back in August 2007.......

www.abovetopsecret.com...

So perhaps I scooped myself. ( Whew, regains some dignity.)

Regards...KK


[edit on 12-5-2009 by kinda kurious]

[edit on 12-5-2009 by kinda kurious]

Originally posted by andy1033
reply to post by mortalengine

 

lol, but why would anyone in the media use wikipedia, what thats something colbert uses to make jokes.

Too many people just take the wikipedia article at face value. If you are prepared to double check the sources they provide at the bottom of the articles, it's a very useful tool.

reply to post by andy1033


It's a good place to get a general idea about something, but for the details and for fact checking other places should be used as well. I go to wikipedia frequently to get the basic gist of things and then go through their list of sources to find the info elsewhere.

If anything, the article proves that those who volunteer to keep wikipedia clean do their jobs very well. They caught the false quote, not the media. So the media would be the ones you don't want to trust without fact checking what they print.

reply to post by kinda kurious


Not true then to doubt Wikipedia as the article did state that Wikipedia's editor all caught on fast and removed the quote.

Originally posted by postmeme
reply to post by kinda kurious

 

Not true then to doubt Wikipedia as the article did state that Wikipedia's editor all caught on fast and removed the quote.

Please note, I did say:

"Yet another reason to doubt Wikipedia as a single source."

Regards......KK

reply to post by mortalengine


A fair point, but the perpetrator of this experiment wasn't a journalism student. He was a sociology student. Perhaps we can forgive his unorthodox approach to punctuation as the product of years of exposure to ham-handed academic language.

Somehow I'm not terribly suprised that the media get their "facts" from wikipedia. I hear my high school teachers in the background hammering into our heads that wikipedia does not count as a source on any of our papers.

reply to post by kinda kurious
Hiya KK, what struck me with his false quotation was the utter mundanity of it. Sometimes people use parody that is so accurate it's assumed to be genuine. Think Spinal Tap Although this wasn't parody, it was well within the boundaries of cliche favored by journalists when musicians or artists die. If Fitzgerald hadn't set the record straight, Jarre's legacy wouldn't have been altered a jot.

Perhaps a quote like, "I regularly enjoyed a menage a trois with Mitterand and Bardot to the soundtrack of the Marseille Marching Brass Band," would have made a greater impression and prompted more attention to sources?

Wikipedia can be a source of good sources if people read the references provided on some Wiki pages. IIRC the NASA STS pages and various 'evolution' pages have excellent sources. People often tar the whole site with the same brush and overlook the minority of authoritative pages.

I still rarely link Wiki pages...