What did Shane Fitzgerald post on Wikipedia?

He posted fake quotes attributed to the composer Maurice Jarre, who recently (March 29, 2009) passed away. The quotes were designed to be memorable, so as to be tempting to bloggers writing about Jarre's death. To Fitzgerald's surprise, many apparently reliable sources of news used the quote, despite it having been a total fabrication that he had posted only there.

Fitzgerald specifically added the quotes in a change visible at < http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maurice_... >. The new section was tagged as needing references within a few minutes (< http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maurice_... >), then removed a few hours later (< http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maurice_... >).

A while later, Fitzgerald re-added one of the fake quotes (< http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maurice_... >). He had to do this a total of three times due to it being removed (the last at < http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maurice_... >), after which the addition of the unsourced quotes was being reverted within minutes (< http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maurice_... >).

It's an interesting case study because it highlights the "traditional", "reliable" sources as using inappropriate sources for their journalism. While it highlights a danger of Wikipedia (that unsourced claims added to Wikipedia can escape and be vindicated by repetition), it highlights more a problem with the conventional media, who are supposed to exercise their own journalistic fact-checking—this was a monumental failure in that respect.

I find it particularly amusing that the Wikipedians exercised more caution with respect to the quotes than the professional journalists did, a fact also noted in some stories about the hoax, such as one at < http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Irish-student-hoaxes... >.

He posted the following quote, attributed to Maurice Jarre:

"One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head and that only I can hear."

Once again, Wikipedia shows that it is inherently unreliable, but Wikipedians will bend over backwards to lay the blame on news journalism.