Here's a little morality tale for our times (via):
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.
The sociology major's made-up 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 quickly caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.
A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began.
"I was really shocked at the results from the experiment," Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.
"I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," he said. "It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."
So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version — or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.
"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."
Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources — none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.
When he saw British 24-hour news channels reporting the death of the triple Oscar-winning composer, Fitzgerald sensed what he called "a golden opportunity" for an experiment on media use of Wikipedia.
He said it took him less than 15 minutes to fabricate and place a quote calculated to appeal to obituary writers without distorting Jarre's actual life experiences.
We are, apparently, meant to hail this Shane Fitzgerald as something of a hero. There's even a picture of him looking smug as he poses, fingers poised, in front of his laptop.
The whole point of Wikipedia, as surely everyone knows by now, is that anyone can make a contribution. It depends on trust. The editors try to monitor new input as best they can, and indeed their system worked fairly well in this case. There are though, inevitably, disputes, disagreements, and questions of interpretation. And then there are out and out malevolent scammers and frauds – like Mr. Fitzgerald here.
So, journalists took a quotation from Wiki without bothering to check the provenance. Oh dear. Perhaps it's because they hadn't considered the possibilty that there'd be someone so petty and dishonest that they'd actually falsify the entry for a recently deceased minor celebrity for the purposes of their own little academic game.
Fitzgerald stressed that Wikipedia's system requiring about 1,500 volunteer "administrators" and the wider public to spot bogus additions did its job, removing the quote three times within minutes or hours. It was journalists eager for a quick, pithy quote that was the problem.
He said the Guardian was the only publication to respond to him in detail and with remorse at its own editorial failing. Others, he said, treated him as a vandal.
He had to put the quote in three times! – as though the Wiki volunteer administrators have nothing better to do than remove deliberate falsifications placed by sociology students aiming to get their picture in the papers.
In a system based on trust, there's nothing easier than to betray that trust. To then come across all self-righteous about it is really a little hard to swallow. It's like that old chestnut of someone shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, except in this case they're claiming they've performed a public service by showing up the gullibility of theatre audiences.
And it's not journalism that'll suffers here; it's Wikipedia again, taking another knock to its credibilty, despite having behaved with exemplary efficiency.
"Vandal" seems about right to me. Why should pretensions to academic research absolve one from the normal requirements of morality?
Mick Hartley 
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