Famed composer Maurice Jarre, Oscar winner for scoring such films as “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago”, passed away on March 28th of this year. His legacy is the number of rich and emotional music he left behind him — and an interesting footnote to journalists everywhere.
It seems that everybody uses Wikipedia these days, some to contribute, but more to check their facts. The problem with that is that Wikipedia is a slightly compromised information source, and should never be used as the sole source for information gathering. This is exactly what numerous respectable newspapers and sites around the globe were guilty of when writing up their obituaries for the French composer.
How do we know this? Because a Dublin, Ireland university student named Shane Fitzgerald decided to test his hypothesis that people will use Wikipedia without doing the proper research to verify what they read in it. He composed a quote about life and music, attributed it to Jarre, and added it to Jarre’s Wikipedia entry. When he read his quote in various news sources, he knew he was right.
Now, it’s one thing for Joe Blogger to mistake fiction for fact, but we hold our traditional news outlets to higher standards; that’s why they’re the NEWS. So it’s a little disturbing to know that there is very little difference between TMZ and Britain’s The Guardian, who so far is the only newspaper to publically admit its mishandling of the obit. The other news outlets have either quietly corrected their mistakes or have left it as-is. I’m not sure which is worse. The only thing I can say for sure is that Manolith is your trusted source for all the world’s news. How do I know? I read it in Wikipedia.
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