Is it true or did I read it on Wikifable?

THE Sydney Morning Herald gave front-page space Friday to breathlessly report staff in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet had been caught editing online fantasy project Wikipedia, to remove unflattering details that might damage the Government.

Like Wikipedia itself, the SMH's story was riddled with inaccuracies - beginning with a claim in the first paragraph that Department staff had removed material from the site's files. As the Secretary to Prime Minister and Cabinet Dr Peter Shergold said later the same day (in a comment which, according to an online search of the SMH's website, the SMH did not report) the Government's internet provider had confirmed that changes made to Wikipedia entries after 2004 and attributed to the Department of PM & C, "were, in fact, not made by anyone in this department or the Prime Minister's Office. "The network address that appears against the changes being reported by the media is that of another customer of our internet service provider - not my department," he said. "If anyone had bothered to contact me about this to confirm their facts I could have quickly checked and responded with the real situation." Whoops! If you're publishing a story claiming that the new WikiScanner website can trace digital fingerprints and indicate the source of edits, it would help to ensure that your own story is accurate. It's almost as if the SMH relied on Wikipedia for the disinformation it haplessly published. A creation of gormless internet generation idealists, Wikipedia is meant to provide everyone who has access to the worldwide web with a free information source built by caring and sharing contributors around the globe. Unfortunately, those caring and sharing people care to share so much disinformation that anyone who cites Wikipedia as a primary source deserves to be ignored. The problem is core to the argument about the unreliability of information posted on the internet generally. Just as the more extreme political parties (such as the Greens) collect more irrational activists, so Wikipedia's contributors appear to be drawn from the fringe. Which may be why the SMH didn't bother checking the bona fides of those who contributed the original material on the Department of PM & C, let alone asking the head of the Department whether its conclusion was accurate. Just as the SMH's flawed report appears to have been untroubled by any serious editorial questioning, material on the internet often appears without qualification. Yet millions of people accept what is posted merely because it has been presented through the magic of cyber technology. Author Andrew Keen, in his book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture, touched on some of the problems that arise from a blind acceptance of cyber information but, as the average GP knows from dealing with sick patients who have self-diagnosed and self-medicated courtesy of medical websites, culture may not be the only thing that has been killed courtesy of the internet. Online disinformation is a scourge of our times, as anyone who has been forced to read some of the comments posted by wannabe commentators on newspaper columnists' blogs. It figures, perhaps, that those with the most time on their hands would be most inclined to live their lives in front of a computer screen indulging their fantasies by offering anonymous abuse, convoluted conspiracy theories or totally irrelevant observations. Permitting anyone to contribute or edit its pages has made the founders of Wikipedia wealthy, but at the expense of the credibility of genuine information sources. It's interesting that the co-founders of the site, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, have parted company over the direction their project has taken. Wales, who enjoys partying with Bono, has stuck with the site and its philosophy of egalitarian idiocy. Sanger has opted for a new site which will be more rigorously edited. Sanger believes Wikipedia suffers "serious management problems, to an often dysfunctional community, to frequently unreliable content and to a whole series of scandals". He has come to the view that "it is also broken beyond repair". Reading Sanger's comments in the online edition of The Times a few weeks ago, before the SMH's inaccurate story was unleashed on its unsuspecting and still misinformed readers, I checked the anonymous entry which is associated with my name on Wikipedia. Though Wikipedia's editors were alerted to its grossly inaccurate content some years ago, it remains grotesquely inaccurate. Given it quotes a wildly inaccurate article from the SMH's Melbourne stablemate The Age, it may have been posted by someone from within the Fairfax organisation. As the SMH's incorrect story on the PM & C remained uncorrected on its website last night, Wikipedia's editors might consider running their WikiScanner over all their entries to ensure they were not sent in from Fairfax websites. That would ensure they would at least be free of one source of disinformation.