Irish student hoaxes worlds media with fake quote – Yahoo! Finance
A sociology student added a fictional quote to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28, 2009. It was picked up and reported by dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the inaccurate material even though administrators at the Wikipedia twice caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it.
“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,” the student said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”
“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.
