Fox News picks up Reuters story regarding the late French composer Maurice Jarre:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,519283,00.html
Reuters interviewed Shane Fitzgerald, the Irish student who made up the false quote on Jarre's Wikipedia biography.
Your thoughts???
William King (Willking1979)
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 2:09 PM, William King williamcarlking@gmail.com wrote:
Fox News picks up Reuters story regarding the late French composer Maurice Jarre:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,519283,00.html
Reuters interviewed Shane Fitzgerald, the Irish student who made up the false quote on Jarre's Wikipedia biography.
"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 Guardian's readers' editor Siobhain Butterworth.
That's about as good a piece of advice as you'll get on using facts from Wikipedia in a journalistic or academic context.
Biographies of people who have recently died need particularly close attention
Sam
Sam Korn wrote:
"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 Guardian's readers' editor Siobhain Butterworth.
That's about as good a piece of advice as you'll get on using facts from Wikipedia in a journalistic or academic context.
Siobhain Butterworth was in touch with me about this story, and I gave her the WP party line (she has the sequence of events slightly wrong, but I pointed out that there were three insertions, not just one, and twice there was action within a few minutes). I had written to her after a related column of hers appeared last November:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/24/leaders-open-door
Charles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boo_(programming_language)
Result:
This wiki has a problem
Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties. Try waiting a few minutes and reloading.
(Cannot contact the database server: Unknown error (10.0.6.22))
- - -
Say What? What the heck does this mean :)
Will
2009/5/8 wjhonson@aol.com:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boo_(programming_language)
Result:
This wiki has a problem
Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties. Try waiting a few minutes and reloading.
(Cannot contact the database server: Unknown error (10.0.6.22))
Say What? What the heck does this mean :)
It means the site is experiencing technical difficulties and you should try waiting a few minutes and reloading.
-----Original Message----- From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Thu, 7 May 2009 5:09 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The sky is falling
2009/5/8 wjhonson@aol.com:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boo_(programming_language)
Result:
This wiki has a problem
Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties. Try waiting a few minutes and reloading.
(Cannot contact the database server: Unknown error (10.0.6.22))
Say What? What the heck does this mean :)
It means the site is experiencing technical difficulties and you should try waiting a few minutes and reloading.>>
----------------------------
Yuck yuck yuck. Very funny. Anyone else?
2009/5/8 wjhonson@aol.com:
(Cannot contact the database server: Unknown error (10.0.6.22)) Say What? What the heck does this mean :)
It means the site is experiencing technical difficulties and you should try waiting a few minutes and reloading.>>
Yuck yuck yuck. Very funny. Anyone else?
Precisely what it says - the Apache (which the MediaWiki software in PHP runs on) can't talk to the database server.
For more detail, ask on wikitech-l :-)
- d.
2009/5/8 wjhonson@aol.com:
-----Original Message----- From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Thu, 7 May 2009 5:09 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The sky is falling
2009/5/8 wjhonson@aol.com:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boo_(programming_language)
Result:
This wiki has a problem
Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties. Try waiting a few minutes and reloading.
(Cannot contact the database server: Unknown error (10.0.6.22))
Say What? What the heck does this mean :)
It means the site is experiencing technical difficulties and you should try waiting a few minutes and reloading.>>
Yuck yuck yuck. Very funny. Anyone else?
What more do you want? The servers hiccuped, it lasted a matter of seconds from what I can tell (maybe a minute if I spent a while reading a page, but I was loading pages fairly frequently shortly before you sent that email). It's not uncommon for the servers to fail to fulfil a request every now and then.
2009/5/8 wjhonson@aol.com:
Say What? What the heck does this mean :)
SEND MORE MONEY!
(Downtime is our most profitable product!)
- d.
2009/5/7 William King williamcarlking@gmail.com:
Fox News picks up Reuters story regarding the late French composer Maurice Jarre: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,519283,00.html Reuters interviewed Shane Fitzgerald, the Irish student who made up the false quote on Jarre's Wikipedia biography. Your thoughts???
So far the coverage I've seen has been quite sensible - *every* journalist uses Wikipedia as their handy quick universal backgrounder, and the stories I've seen have blamed the obituary writers for not checking references.
- d.
Similar to the story of adding one more name for a German politician. This seems very hypocritical of "traditional" sources, to call Wikipedia unreliable, and then copy it verbatim. How many more embarrassments do they need to take before they stop?
________________________________ From: William King williamcarlking@gmail.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Thursday, May 7, 2009 9:09:14 PM Subject: [WikiEN-l] False quote regarding Maurice Jarre
Fox News picks up Reuters story regarding the late French composer Maurice Jarre:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,519283,00.html
Reuters interviewed Shane Fitzgerald, the Irish student who made up the false quote on Jarre's Wikipedia biography.
Your thoughts???
William King (Willking1979) _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l