A sociology student put a fake quote into the Wiki entry for French composer Maurice Jarre nearly immediatley after he died, and the quote got picked up all over the place by journalists writing Jarre’s obituary:
“The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn’t use information they find there if it can’t be traced back to a reliable primary source,” said the readers’ editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.
Walsh said this was the first time to his knowledge that an academic researcher had placed false information on a Wikipedia listing specifically to test how the media would handle it.