Irish student hoaxes world's media with florid but phony quote from dead French composer on Wikipedia, which "flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India"
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Irish student hoaxes world's media with fake quote
Irish student hoaxes world's media with florid but phony quote from dead French composer
- On Monday May 11, 2009, 12:07 pm EDT
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.
"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. He noted that the Wikipedia listing on Jarre did not have any other strong quotes.
If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source -- and even might trigger alarms as "too good to be true." But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.
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 who was solely to blame for their cut-and-paste content.
"The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source," said the readers' editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.
"It's worrying that the misinformation only came to light because the perpetrator of the deception emailed publishers to let them know what he'd done, and it's regrettable that he took nearly a month to do so," she wrote.
Fitzgerald said he had waited in part to test whether news organizations or the public would smoke out the quote's lack of provenance. He said he was troubled that none did.
And he warned that a truly malicious hoaxer could have evaded Wikipedia's own informal policing by getting a newspaper to pick up a false piece of information -- as happened when his quote made its first of three appearances -- and then use those newspaper reports as a credible footnote for the bogus quote.
"I didn't want to be devious," he said. "I just wanted to show how the 24-hour, minute-by-minute media were now taking material straight from Wikipedia because of the deadline pressure they're under."
Guardian article on controversy, http://us.lrd.yahoo.com/_ylt=AnZY6eAf9Pmp8Sv9vmw0MS7yKIkA/SIG=10uqris1h/**http%3A//tinyurl.com/djqd8w
Soundtrack Geek blog on Jarre, http://us.lrd.yahoo.com/_ylt=Aq8RMNUcECNeOojvYQYegFjyKIkA/SIG=10usj33bq/**http%3A//tinyurl.com/d527zh
Wikipedia site criticizing itself, http://us.lrd.yahoo.com/_ylt=Ajgv5TbpZeK57QbtdVxZAUjyKIkA/SIG=11qh73nrb/**http%3A//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism--of--Wikipedia
Article: HERE
The readers' editor on ... web hoaxes and the pitfalls of quick journalism
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- The Guardian, Monday 4 May 2009
- Article history
An obituary of French composer Maurice Jarre, which appeared in the Guardian on 31 March, began and ended with quotes. It opened with: "My life has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life" - and closed with: "Music is how I will be remembered. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear." The words, however, were not Jarre's, they were Shane Fitzgerald's - the 22-year-old student at University College Dublin had put them on Jarre's Wikipedia page a day earlier.
Fitzgerald's timing could not have been better. He added the fake quote shortly after the composer died and just as writers were working on his obituaries. The Guardian commissioned an obituary writer on the morning of 30 March, giving him only a few hours to produce a substantial piece on Jarre's life for the following day's paper. He was not the only one taken in by the hoax - the quote was recycled in several other obituaries published in print and on the web. Fitzgerald told me that he'd looked for something (or someone) journalists would be under pressure to write about quickly. Jarre's death was "the right example, at the right time", he said.
What others might see as an act of vandalism, Fitzgerald calls research. In an email last week he apologised for deliberately misleading people and for altering Jarre's Wikipedia page. He said his purpose was to show that journalists use Wikipedia as a primary source and to demonstrate the power the internet has over newspaper reporting.
Fitzgerald's fakery was not particularly sophisticated. All he did was add a quote to Jarre's Wikipedia page and he provided nothing to back it up. The absence of a footnote containing a reference for the quote ought to have made obituary writers suspicious.
Wikipedia editors were more sceptical about the unsourced quote. They deleted it twice on 30 March and when Fitzgerald added it the second time it lasted only six minutes on the page. His third attempt was more successful - the quote stayed on the site for around 25 hours before it was spotted and removed again.
The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source.
The desirability of telling readers where information comes from shouldn't be overlooked either. The Guardian's editorial code advises that when quotes are taken from another publication, journalists should acknowledge the source. The guidance is less strictly adhered to in obituaries, features and blogs than it is in news stories, and it wasn't followed here. If it had been, editors would soon have discovered a problem with the quote.
Readers of the obituaries are not the only victims of this deception - those close to Jarre may be distressed to discover that his obituaries have been tainted in this way. Fitzgerald said he thought carefully about the nature of the remarks he falsely attributed to the composer: "I tried to think of a quote that was very general," he said. "I didn't want to falsify someone's obituary."
It's worrying that the misinformation only came to light because the perpetrator of the deception emailed publishers to let them know what he'd done and it's regrettable that he took nearly a month to do so. Why did he wait so long? "I apologise for that," he said. "I was originally going to do a report for my class and then it didn't work out. I know I should have told you sooner."
Fitzgerald says he is shocked by the results of his "experiment" with Jarre's Wikipedia page. "I expected the quote to get into the blogs, but I didn't expect it to get into mainstream newspapers," he said. He came up with the idea while writing an essay on globalisation and the media: "My aim was to show that an undergraduate university student in Ireland can influence what newspapers are doing around the world and also that the reliance of newspapers on the internet can lead to some faults," he told me. Consider the job done Shane.
reader@guardian.co.uk
Article: HERE
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