Student's Wikipedia Hoax Fools Newspapers

.................The 22-year-old sociology and economics student at University College Dublin said he had expected blogs and perhaps small newspapers to use the quotes but did not believe major publications would rely on Wikipedia without further checks.

"I was wrong. Quality newspapers in England, India, America and as far away as Australia had my words in their reports of Jarre's death," Fitzgerald wrote in an article in Thursday's Irish Times newspaper.

Britain's Guardian was one title that had to correct its obituary, saying the fake quotes appeared to have originated on Wikipedia before being duplicated on other websites.

"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 Guardian's readers' editor Siobhain Butterworth.

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