Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-05-11/In the news

Fake quote reproduced in newspaper obituaries
Following the death of Maurice Jarre on 28 March, many newspapers carried an obituary that included a quote attributed to the French composer: ""One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. 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.""

The quote, it was revealed this week, was lifted from Wikipedia. It was a hoax perpetrated by Shane Fitzgerald, a 22-year-old college student in Dublin, Ireland. Fitzgerald came clean this week, explaining that he had inserted the quote into Wikipedia while working on an essay about globalization and the media but hadn't expected it to be picked up beyond blogs and minor news sources. Instead, it spread to newspapers across the globe.

"My aim," Fitzgerald said, "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." No newspapers had caught the fake quote before Fitzgerald contacted publishers.

The quote was added between Jarre's death and the obituaries that began appearing three days later. As The Irish Times notes, Fitzgerald added unsourced quotes several times; the second time his quote remained in the article for over 24 hours, while the first and third times it was removed more quickly.

Wikinews reports vandalism from U.S. Congress computers
A story published this week on Wikinews, "Congressional computers continue to be used to vandalize Wikipedia", reports on recent "questionable edits" that have been made from IP addresses assigned to the U.S. Congress. In addition to whitewashing the biographies of politicians, recent edits from Congress include "highly biased statements to articles related to abortion" and "racial slurs and references to gay pedophilia" in the biography of Catholic League president William A. Donohue.

Wikipedia research and scholarship

 * Social media scholar Mathieu O'Neil (author of the recent book Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes, which will be reviewed in the Signpost) critiques the role of expertise and sourcing in Wikipedia in "Wikipedia: experts are us", an essay in Le Monde diplomatique.
 * Joseph Reagle, who wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Wikipedia's collaborative culture, has an article in the journal ACM Interactions, "Wikipedia: the happy accident", in which he examines how Wikipedia's origins can be interpreted alternatively in terms of cultural and technological determinism or serendipity.
 * In a new study in First Monday, "Comparing featured article groups and revision patterns correlations in Wikipedia", FOSS scholar Giacomo Poderi looks for differences in editing patterns and structure between topic areas with many Featured articles and topics areas with few.

Briefly

 * Larry Sanger has a rejoinder to Jimmy Wales' recent interview in Hot Press. Last month Sanger posted an open letter to Wales in response to Wales' characterization of Sanger's role in the early history of Wikipedia.
 * Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that at a recent Wikipedia conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner&mdash;in response to charges of "problematic" coverage of Israel&mdash;explained that Wikipedia is "just another mainstream news medium" and that "more or less the same mistakes can be found in the New York Times".
 * Wikipedia was a punchline in the comic strip Dilbert on 8 May.
 * Blogger "Vaughan" of mindhacks.com reports that a bit of Wikipedia text he wrote, the lede of the article Capgras delusion, appeared as dialogue in the 2008 film The Broken.
 * BBC News appears to have taken an image from Wikimedia Commons, File:Rodina mat zovet.jpg (now in Wikipedia at File:The Motherland Calls.jpg), to illustrate a recent story about the unstable statue The Motherland Calls.
 * Based on a hands-on preview of the answer-engine Wolfram Alpha (which launches on 18 May), ReadWriteWeb reports that, in order to make up for weaknesses in the underlying data, Wolfram Alpha "adds links to relevant Wikipedia articles to every results page."
 * In testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, in a public hearing on "The Future of Journalism", Google Vice President Marissa Mayer suggested that Wikipedia's structure is a model for newspapers. She asked publishers to imagine "how the authoritativeness of news articles might grow if an evolving story were published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity."  She noted that "[w]e see this practice today in Wikipedia's entries and in the topic pages at NYTimes.com."