dpbsmith wrote:
Good, right? Unfortunately the reporter did not cite his source. So someone contacted that reporter and asked.
And, guess what: the reporter's source was the Wikipedia article.
Yowza. Just like the apocryphal small town where the City Hall manager set the town hall's clock based on the factory whistle, and unbeknownst to him the factory superintendent...
On the one hand I'm tempted to wring my hands and say, *how* can we better get across to responsible people (like presumably newspaper editors) the well-known fact that Wikipedia is not necessarily reliable and can't be relied on as a sole source?
But on the other hand, Wikipedia is now "good enough" that this kind of thing is absolutely inevitable. (I'm a responsible person, and I'm pretty sure *I* take Wikipedia articles at face value more often than I strictly ought to.)
It's like consumer-grade GPS receivers: everybody knows they're not 100% accurate; the manufacturers all include various disclaimers, but they work so magically well, most of the time, that it's all but inevitable that, say, a sailor somewhere is going to try to rely on his GPS receiver to navigate a narrow channel in the fog, where the width of the channel is down on a par with the GPS uncertainty radius...
(Apologies for the rambling. No, I don't know what the right answer is.)