Irony: Reuters Article Slamming Wikipedia For Corrections… Needs Correcting

Overhype

from the funny-how-that-works dept

There are a group of folks who just love to criticize Wikipedia — usually because they want it to be something it’s not. As long as people understand the methodology in creating Wikipedia entries, there’s really no issue at all. That’s why it seemed so bizarre last week, after reports of Ken Lay’s death showed up, that Reuters ran what was a pretty useless article about how Ken Lay’s Wikipedia changed rapidly after reports of his death came out — and some of those changes were somewhat different than the eventual story that came out. There’s nothing particularly newsworthy there. Like any breaking story, some of the details may get confused at the beginning, but as the details become clearer the story gets crafted. Plenty of mainstream news stories have experienced the same exact thing. In fact… it happened in this very Reuters article. Slashdot points to someone who noticed the irony over the fact that Reuters needed to issue its very own correction on the story after it got its sources confused. What’s even more ironic is, of course, that there are still plenty of versions of the uncorrected Reuters piece out there, but over at Wikipedia you can easily look back at the history yourself and see the corrections. So, where’s Reuters breathless article on how Reuters’ mistake “underscores the challenges” facing a news agency like Reuters “which as the news was breaking offered a variety of [sources] for [its story]”?