Wikipedia Vs Research: Received Wisdom

"Yesterday's articles about the life of Norman Wisdom included many credits, but overstepped in attributing to him the lyrics to the song There'll Be Blue Birds Over the White Cliffs of Dover (Chaplin's only rival: Norman Wisdom, last of the music hall greats, dies at 95, 5 October, page 3) and saying he was nominated for an Oscar for The Night They Raided Minsky's (The lost art of slapstick, page 3; Sir Norman Wisdom obituary, guardian.co.uk)."
Corrections and Clarifications, The Guardian.

Yesterday was a great day for media mischief makers.
Several newspapers printed as fact nonsense like the above nicked from Norman Wisdom's "vandalised" Wikipedia entry.
As they haven't corrected it or included it in the above mea culpa, Fagburn presumes The Guardian is still sticking to the wonderful "fact" they printed on page 3 yesterday:
"In the early 1970s, [Norman Wisdom] was personally invited by Mao on a month-long tour of China."
The Guardian is almost certainly the best paper at admitting their mistakes, and their daily Corrections and Clarifications column is a hoot, and knowingly so.
They also fessed up to publishing the White Cliffs of Dover fiction on Media Guardian yesterday - and pointed out it had also turned up in tributes in the Daily Mirror and The Independent.
No journalist - certainly not an unprofessional fuckwit like Fagburn - can gloat over this story.
It happens to the very best of us.
The acclaimed biographer - and a journalist Fagburn loves - Roger Lewis, included the nonsense about Wisdom's Oscar nomination in his tribute to Norman in today's Daily Telegraph (Still present and incorrect online at the time of typing).
The problem is not mirthful moments like this, but journalists with specialist knowledge being replaced with idiots who know nothing and can only cut-and-paste from Wikipedia and/or a press release.
Little parlour game: Pick a magazine article at random, say a profile of some gayer of note in a gay mag, and see how much of the info in it is also in the relevant Wikipedia entry, and how much has come from elsewhere.
If a journalist has got nothing else to add, then why not just print the URL?
Here's a classic example - a Pink Paper story about Ben Summerskill getting his OBE in November 2009.
Here is Ben Summerskill's Wikipedia entry.
There is a four paragraph potted bio of Summerskill at the end of the Pink Paper story.
It is missing one crucial part of his CV - presumably as it is not mentioned in his Wikipedia entry.
But you might have thought a journalist writing for The Pink Paper would have known that Ben Summerskill used to be the editor of The Pink Paper.
Let's just hope this whole sorry episode has been a learning experience for all of us.
Don't trust anything you read on Wikipedia.
Don't trust anything you read by a journalist.
And most of all don't believe anything you read by a hypotwit like me.
Okay - now go and tell some inventive lies on Wikipedia.