Regret the Error

This a bit meta.
Giles Hattersley wrote an article for the Sunday Times (London) that reported Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales would soon make “a controversial proposal to ensure that changes to the most popular wiki-pages are vetted before they go live.” The goal of the proposal was to help reduce factual errors and vandalism on the site. Soon after the story was published, Hattersley came under fire for making an error of his own. From a blog post by the Daily Telegraph’s Shane Richmond:

Giles Hattersley, writing in today’s Times, bemoans the inaccuracy of Wikipedia. Regular readers of this blog will know that I disagree completely but that’s not why I’m writing.
Giles writes: “My entry features at least two errors, one libellous (unless my mother has been keeping a dark secret, I am not Roy Hattersley’s son).”
Yet I can’t find an entry for Giles Hattersley in Wikipedia. And, as Martin Belam points out, it doesn’t look like there has ever been one.
Journalists should always strive for accuracy and such an error in an article about inaccuracy looks very silly. I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Hattersley later posted an explanation on, of all places, Wikipedia:

As to this thing about a Wikipedia entry – as far as I know, I’ve never had one. I think the line must have been tweaked at some stage (not by me) from talking about mentions of my name on the site to an actual entry. The mistake pointed out in the piece, was pointed out to me a year or two ago in some corresponding page where my name cropped up – either Roy Hattersley’s entry, or a third party’s page. I’m glad to hear it no longer exists!

Okay, so perhaps it was an editing error. But also note that Hattersley doesn’t seem to know when and where he came upon the incorrect Wikipedia reference to himself. Based on the above, it was pointed out to him on “some corresponding page” by somebody at some point over the last two years. And now it no longer exists. Shouldn’t he have checked the reference before putting it in the story?

To close the circle, the Times has appended an Editor’s Note to the original article:

This article has been updated to reflect Giles Hattersley’s original, which was changed during editing of the print edition of the Sunday Times. The sentence that read, “My entry features at least two errors, one libellous.” has now reverted to, “Mentions of me feature at least two errors (unless my mother has been keeping a dark secret, I am not Roy Hattersley’s son).”

To summarize: some Wikipedia entries contain factual errors, as do some newspaper articles about Wikipedia’s inaccuracies.

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