From: wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Ray Saintonge
It's an interesting example of how errors manage to creep in. The article states that Meehan is a Senator; he's a Representative. It also states that he had planned to limit himself to four years in Congress; that should read four terms. These are innocent errors that do not affect the impact of the article. It's easy to spot these when you are familiar with the issue, but it leaves one wondering about fact checking and the reliability of what we read in the newspapers. ;-)
When a newspaper publishes an article on some area of my oarticular interest, written by a regular journalist, they INVARIABLY get some important (to me) facts wrong. I've lost count of how often I've seen an APC or SPG misidentified as "a tank" in photograph captions, for example.
Wikipedia is hardly exempt, as we all know. However, there's always that [edit] button, and how often do we wish that there was something similar for newspaper sites, eh?
Peter (Skyring)