Irish Joe vs. the Wikipedia

And good day to you all.

It seems that one of our favorite online resources has been tarnished of late. Wikipedia's quirky, all-knowing name has been dragged through the mud by a ruddy Irish lad.

Shane Fitzgerald, a sociology student in Dublin, posted a fake quote on the page of French film composer Maurice Jarre when he recently died. Many blogs and international news outlets ran the quote in obituaries and tributes assuming it to be true.

Because Wikipedia is edited by Internet roaming nerds such as you fine people, it's not 100% accurate. Fitzgerald was trying to see how much journalists would weigh accuracy in this age of MUST HAVE NEWS NOW, and it seems that they weighed it...not at all.

A month passed and the quote wasn't retracted, even though Wikipedia removed it from it's page THREE TIMES, when its own editorial staff found it to be false. As it turns out, in this case, the Internet roaming nerds upheld accuracy more so than the journalists.

Fitzgerald has since come forward with what happened, but that doesn't change the fact that this a reminder to those of us in the media that Wikipedia and other informational websites are great places to start, yet shouldn't be the final word.

Yes, everyone is in a hurry these days, especially journalists seeing as news consumption has risen dramatically, and it's easy to assume something is correct when you're in a hurry. But you know what happens when you assume, right?

You get your ass handed to you by an Irish college student.