Intellectual Property Law

?Irish student hoaxes world?s media with fake quote?

By Ann Bartow

From Yahoo News:

When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

The sociology major’s made-up quote ? which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28 ? flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.

They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began. …

No surprise here!

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Full post as published by Madisonian.net on May 12, 2009 (boomark / email).