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Independent bigs up the 'Wanky Balls festival'

It is a truthiness universally acknowledged that a single journalist should not use Wikipedia as a source without independently checking its veracity. Nevertheless, examples of howling wikifacts make it to print with unerring frequency, with the result that such errors are now largely ignored as "dog bites man" tales of the web …

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Anonymous Coward

A long time ago...

...way before there was a Wikipedia a journalist told me "the internet is a mine of information, much of it wrong". These days I think you could probably replace the word much with most. And yet many journos still treat anything they find on the net as gospel.

The worst thing is the cyclic citation. Do research on some Wikipedia articles and you will find that the citations point to other online sources, which point to others and so on eventually back to the original Wikipedia article. I wonder what the lowest hop count is at the moment. Probably 2.

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Coffee/keyboard

@Whoever did that.

Thank you for brightening up a really shitty day!

I'm so pleased that I'll let you off the cost of the keyboard.

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ahem

The "Independent" haha

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Silver badge

Don't knock the Indy

After all they identified el Reg as a hotbed of lesbian Internetitude.

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Paris Hilton

I get all my...

I get all my lesbian stories from el Reg (and to be fair, I also get all my transvestites having sex with dogs in ditches stories from here to!) and all my wanky balls stories from the independent!

I wouldn't have it any other way I can tell you!

Paris, naturally!

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Coat

I am fulminating so violently I cannot muster a title

It's vexing to say the least, to see decades of repeating to users not to trust the interwebs ever is having absolutely no effect whatsoever!!

The only thing more worrying point about this story is that it shows how the newspapers and the rest of mainstream media are just as unreliable as Wikipedia.

Whom can one trust now half the media is owned by Murdoch and other half have been proven to be idiots, liars or both??

/rant.

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Two halves?

"Whom can one trust now half the media is owned by Murdoch and other half have been proven to be idiots, liars or both??"

Didn't you just describe the same "half" twice?

Wikipedia is probably more reliable than most of Murdoch's rags. At least it occasionally cites its sources, which is one step beyond Murdoch's crew.

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Yay!

Finally, one of my tip-offs makes it to ElReg

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Joke

Well done!

Congrats on your "red hot tip"

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but now

it's in a newspaper, it can be rewritten on Wiki with the indie as a source.

ctrl+c then ctrl+v That's Journalism!

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@Lottie

This is exactly what I was thinking. I thought that wiki's rules for sources basically amounted to "if it's in print, or it's on teh intarwebs somewhere then we can use at as a Wikipedia source." So in this case, someone defaces a Wikipedia page, which then makes it into a newspaper which can be used as an "accurate and reliable source" to keep the defamation on the Wikipedia page thus....

...what?

I don't know, honestly. Inventing a "fact?" Is there even a word for that kind of information manipulation? This is why I honestly believe that trusting Wikipedia is as bad as reading a history book without keeping the axiom "history is written by the victors" in the back of your mind. Filtering bias from crowd sourced information is bloody near impossible.

Primary sources, please. I'll make my judgements as to the reliability of the information I receive based on the reputations of the individuals and organisations that perform the original research. For the record, “The Independent” has proven itself to no longer be high on my list of reputable resources…

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Gold badge

Hmm

I should have phrased that differently. "For the record, “The Independent” has proven itself to no longer be high on my list of reputable resources…" is incorrect. It implied The Independent was at one point high on my list of reputable resources. I really hadn't heard of it until now, so that would be impossible. It's gone from "unknown resource" to "shite" in a short timeframe however.

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Is there even a word for that kind of information manipulation?

Yes, it's called "Politics"

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Badgers

Dean Macey

One of my current favourites ...."Dean Macey has never married. He is fond of cats."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Macey

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I bet they sponsor it next year

The Independent Wanky Balls Festival 2011.

Has a nice ring to it :-D

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Happy

Independent Wanky Balls Festival 2011

I am soooo there!

<--Happy ball icon

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Happy

woah "hang" about...

woah "hang" about you forgot the other ball!

<---- Don't worry, here it is!

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Anonymous Coward

It was called Wanky Balls - I was there.

Did you check that there wasn't a Wanky Balls fest?

Now that would be rather ironic if you have based the article based on someone's blog and it never even appeared in the newspaper

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Nonsense feedback

That would result in all heads at Castle El Reg. exploding in some kind of nonsense feedback loop.

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Citable source?

Can Wikipedia now include the Indy's article as a citable source and therefore reinclude the "Wanky Balls" mention, after all, a major newspaper did state it...

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References

Now that it's in the Independent, it could be cited as a source and kept in Wikipeida forever.

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Jobs Horns

Hand in geek cards, now

17 posts and nobody has done a whois lookup on the now-banned IP from which the offending edit was made.

<-- hint

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IT Angle

Ahh, the pressure of deadlines...

Good to see that it leads to the same sort of shortcuts in other "industries" as well.

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I went

It *was* a load of wanky balls.

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Big Brother

@f1rest0rm

Unfortunatley it seems that Dean Macey is no longer fond of cats.

Seeing as it was corrected only half an hour after you pointed it out, I would be careful what you say in the future.

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Happy

Don't think this is new ...

... in fact it's the Internet that helps us find out that these things are false.

My ol' dad, who was a sociable type, knew people who had every different kind of expertise under the sun. He observed that anyone remotely knowledgeable about subject X would tell you that most of what was written about X in the press was completely false. As this seemed to be true for a very large set of X, he concluded that most of what was written in the press was completely false.

In the old days when stupid stuff like this was printed, it was much less easy to challenge it.

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Badgers

Lol

He (for how could it be otherwise) also made a few other illuminating edits, such as:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=Pok%C3%A9mon:_The_First_Movie&diff=prev&oldid=378168494

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Kat Arney

Kat is also one of the Naked Scientists (www.thenakedscientists.com) and a very clever lady. I listen to their podcast every week (it comes out of Cambridge Uni) and it is always entertaining and informative. The most entertaining part is listening to them stumble around the pronunciation of the American Medical Journal P.N.A.S.

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Headmaster

PNAS

PNAS is not a medical journal, is general science (which includes a fraction biomedical, of course). As the name says, "proceedings of the national academy of science"...

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wanky balls to your title

Well, ok - I was just going from my memory, which is famously bad. :)

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wanky balls

wasn't he a government minister?

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WTF?

But I thought...

it was the Daily Wail which published all the Wanky Balls articles?

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Joke

Daily Wail

Nah, the Daily Wail would just run a front page headline screaming that Wanky Balls cause cancer...

...as does reading rival newspapers, using Facebook, using electric nights when you take a leak at night, eating any form of meat, using any household chemical, touching plastic bottles, going on HRT, or any other activity which humanity didn't do 10,000 years ago.

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Anonymous Coward

Wiki Balls

Has it occurred to anybody that journalism works on the principal that if you get information from a single source then it's OK to print it.

Now of course we went to war on the same principal. A single source told the government that Iraq had WMD and we went to war on that basis. Now who was Tony's favourite advisor at the time and what was his previous profession? So did we have years of the country being run on the same principals as a Fleet Street paper?

If his Tonyness was still in power would we now be living in a country run on the say so of "facts" found on Wikipedia.

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