Why no mention of the Parkland shooting media hoax?
Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2018 1:23 am
It got plenty of coverage at the time.....
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/ ... sts-415672
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-des ... d-shooting
.....so, a typical case of Wikipedia sloppiness, a conscious decision to exclude it as trivia, or something more sinister?
Without trawling the complete edit history, the sad reality of Wikipedia is that you can easily make a case for any of those three explanations.....
1. Wikipedians are just amateurs and the project lacks coordination, so basic ommissions like this can and do happen. It did after all develop while lots of other pieces about the shooting were coming in thick and fast.
2. They have also been known to decide that even if some detail of a story received in depth coverage in multiple outlets at the time, including it can still be a case of TRIVIA or a NOTNEWS violation. There's no way of predicting the outcome of such discussions, if indeed one even took place, since the guidelines are vague and editors have wildly different interpretations of them.
3. And finally, you can also pretty easily imagine the Wikipedians being awfully reluctant to highlight when their model breaks down, and they are unwitting parties to the spread of fake news - they did after all include in their article the information introduced to the media through this hoax.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/ ... sts-415672
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-des ... d-shooting
.....so, a typical case of Wikipedia sloppiness, a conscious decision to exclude it as trivia, or something more sinister?
Without trawling the complete edit history, the sad reality of Wikipedia is that you can easily make a case for any of those three explanations.....
1. Wikipedians are just amateurs and the project lacks coordination, so basic ommissions like this can and do happen. It did after all develop while lots of other pieces about the shooting were coming in thick and fast.
2. They have also been known to decide that even if some detail of a story received in depth coverage in multiple outlets at the time, including it can still be a case of TRIVIA or a NOTNEWS violation. There's no way of predicting the outcome of such discussions, if indeed one even took place, since the guidelines are vague and editors have wildly different interpretations of them.
3. And finally, you can also pretty easily imagine the Wikipedians being awfully reluctant to highlight when their model breaks down, and they are unwitting parties to the spread of fake news - they did after all include in their article the information introduced to the media through this hoax.