Wikipedia hoax points to limits of journalists’ research

Wikipedia may be a fantastic resource, but any savvy Internet user is aware of its limits. Edit wars, entries made and modified for PR purposes, hoaxes, and basic inaccuracies all creep into (and back out of) the system, meaning that any use of the information there for purposes that might be considered significant should require some serious fact-checking. And, accordingly, many academics don't accept references to Wikipedia, and its entries have been rejected as evidence by US courts. So, it's a bit of a surprise to find out that one Wikipedia hoax, perpetrated by a sociology student, managed to appear in a variety of news reports, and has stayed there even after the hoax was revealed.

According to the AFP, the hoax traces back to Shane Fitzgerald, a student at Ireland's University College Dublin. Upon learning of the death of the Oscar-winning composer Maurice Jarre, the student modified his Wikipedia entry, adding a completely fictitious post that was nicely designed to fit perfectly into any obituary. "When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear," the added material read in part.

Fitzgerald was apparently curious how far his hoax would spread, and expected it to appear on a variety of blogs and similar sites. Instead, to his surprise, a search picked it up in articles that appeared at a variety of newspapers. Fitzgerald eventually removed his own fabricated quote and notified a variety of news outlets that they had been tricked, but not all of them have apparently seen fit to publish corrections or to ensure that their original stories were accurate, even though fixing a webpage shouldn't be a challenging thing.

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Of course, it shouldn't be a surprise that journalists use Wikipedia as part of their research—especially in this case, as Jarre's entry comes out on top of the heap in a Google search for his name. However, the discovery that so many of the writers apparently failed to find an additional source on that quote comes at a rather awkward time for journalists in traditional media, who are facing a struggle to stay above water as the newspaper industry is sinking and the line between traditional journalism and casual reporting gets ever blurrier.

A key part of the argument for maintaining traditional journalism is that its trained reporters can perform research and investigations that the untrained masses can't, and the content they produce is run by editors and fact-checkers. The revelation that their research is often no more sophisticated than an average Web surfer's, and that the fact checking can be nonexistent, really doesn't help that argument much.

Of course, it could easily be argued that this was a one-off instance, and the particular circumstances—an obituary—lessens the importance of the gaffe. No harm, no foul. If only that were the case. In what's an excellent piece of journalism, The Wall Street Journal's health blog has tracked the findings of a group of researchers that are exploring how press releases and journalism describe medical research to the public.

We've covered this issue via a couple of anecdotes in the past, but several studies have explored things in a systematic manner, and the results are pretty discouraging. Press releases, the raw material of a lot of journalism, don't always acknowledge the limitations of studies and, at least partially as a result, relevant information is missing from many press reports. "News stories about scientific meeting research presentations often omit basic study facts and cautions," the authors of one of these studies conclude. "Consequently, the public may be misled about the validity and relevance of the science presented."

And that's medicine.

If there are going to be arguments made for the persistence of journalism as a vital force in modern society, they will undoubtedly need to be based on the role of the press in conveying accurate information. Incidents like these, along with the hard numbers provided by more rigorous studies, will make it much harder to make those arguments.