One undergraduate student with a lot of time on his hands

[Ryudo Lee]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10236279-71.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

So this student in Ireland decides that he's gonna play around with Wikipedia and drops some of his own poetry into the article of a recently deceased composer.  Wikipedia catches it the first couple of times, in near record time, but they missed it the third time around.  25 hours later, his poetry shows up in newspaper obituaries for the composer.

It's a sad state of affairs for newspapers, when they're pulling articles from Wikipedia, and not checking up on the sources.

[Tapewolf]

Apparently the Guardian did issue a retraction.

Anyway, the best part of this trick is when the fake article uses its mention in a print newspaper.  Then it becomes impossible to retract it because it has a valid citation.  IIRC the current (or possible previous) German Chancellor of the Exchequer was appointed and the Wikipedia article spelled his name wrong.  This was then fed into the newspapers and then any attempts to set it back to the correct name were rolled back as vandalism by the 'editors'.
Wikipedia has more than a few problems.

Here it is:  http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/10/2211220&from=rss

[ShadesFox]

Yea, more and more I'm becoming convinced that wikipedia editors are the scum of the world.

It is like they seriously subscribe to Colbert's truthyness concept.

[superluser]

I suspect it's just exposing bad journalistic practices that have existed for far longer than Wikipedia.

I do, however, believe that journalists have gotten lazier lately.

[rabid_fox]

Aha. Ireland - subversive and pointless.

[LionHeart]

Yea, more and more I'm becoming convinced that wikipedia editors are the scum of the world.

It is like they seriously subscribe to Colbert's truthyness concept.

Beware the Wiki Pirates

[Alondro]

Aha. Ireland - subversive and pointless.

But Ireland has leprachauns!  I need their pot o' gold!  And their Lucky Charms.