Irish Student Hoaxes World’s Media with Fake Quote

Making up fake quotes may once have been considered a school boy prank. Today, when those quotes are posted on the world’s foremost online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and then are incorrectly attributed by numerous online news services, it becomes an experiment in how globalization monitors itself. A Dublin university student posted a fake quote of composer and conductor Maurice Jarre on Wikipedia on occasion of his death. Wikipedia quickly caught the unsourced quote and deleted it but not before the quote was picked up by a number of news services and left posted on their websites until the same student informed the websites of their error. Only one news site, The Guardian, posted an apology for the error. This curious story highlights two trends: how the quickening pace of communications places greater stress on timely news reporting, sometimes at the expense of fact-checking; and how pervasive is the inherent faith placed in what appears on the internet. – YaleGlobal