When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia , 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.
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“I was really shocked at the results from the experiment,” Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.
“I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” he said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”
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