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Sat 05 May 2009Unreliably informed
PRESENT TENSE:GOOD OLD Wikipedia: the byword for the democratisation of information - and a byword for just how unreliable information can be. It should come with one of those small print warnings: "This site is for entertainment purposes only."
Wikipedia, and journalists' supposed reliance on it, came up again this week thanks to Shane Fitzgerald, a sociology and economics student at UCD. He carried out an experiment at the end of March, when he heard of the composer Maurice Jarre's death and placed a false quote on the musician's Wikipedia entry in the hope that it would be picked up by the world's media.
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