Fake Wikipedia polluted nearly half of all CIA Director bios

[CrowsNest]

According to former CIA officer Ned Price, latterly spokesperson of the National Security Council, who quit the agency rather than serve under Trump, the current CIA Director and newly appointed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is [u]not[/u] a Gulf War 1 veteran.

This is despite the fact "nearly half" of all his "public biographies", including the sources used by 51 Members of Congress in drafting their letter endorsing him for Sec. State, claim he did. He was in the Army at the time, but was not deployed.

https://splinternews.com/the-cia-says-m ... 1825422682

Price sadly focuses on whether or not Pompeo was happy for this error to go uncorrected, when in reality, the real story here is it looks like the source of this disinformation is none other than the good old fake news fighters, Teh Wikipedia.

Quartz happily takes up that angle in great investigatory detail, while also giving Pompeo the stinkeye.....

https://qz.com/1258418/mike-pompeos-gul ... wikipedia/

It turns out it was added there by an IP user on a mobile phone on 1 December 2016, and despite it proliferating into numerous reliable sources, amazingly it never got retconned back into the article as a source (to complete the virtuous circle of citogenisis). It just stayed there, as an unverified fact on the Wikipedia biography of the eventual CIA Director. Proof that they're not checking shit.

Even more fucked up....the first newspaper seen using it, was none other than the goddam Washington Post.

Wikipedia and all its stupid supporters and flunkies need to just get into the sea.

[CrowsNest]

Of course, the Wikipediots are blaming everyone but themselves......

My feeling is that there must have been another source. All these news organizations wouldn't have just followed Wikipedia IMHO. Where else would it have come from? Perhaps from Pompeo or his staff? maybe from the CIA? A Pompeo related source makes sense in that Pompeo never corrected the mistake...... Smallbones(smalltalk) 00:54, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

What the hell happened to "Trust, but verify"? This smacks of journalistic malpractice. —Jeremy v^_^v Bori! 04:56, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

What the Quartz article doesn't say is that in this edit on 2 December 2016, Rms125a@hotmail.com added an unsourced template to the section, so it was flagged as unsourced very quickly. ..... Since the claim that Pompeo served in the Gulf War isn't libellous or completely implausible, it may have gone unnoticed that it wasn't correct. .....It's well known that some people make Walter Mitty-esque claims about their military service, so claims in this area need to be checked out and not allowed to go unsourced for any length of time. ..... I don't think this is the greatest disaster in the history of BLPs as there have been bigger cock-ups than this. Nevertheless, it shows that material has to be checked and verified. It also shows that the mainstream media often uses Wikipedia articles as a crib sheet, but we know this already.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 06:03, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

....it's arguable, without stronger evidence that there is not a rather more innocent explanation - 'it didn't matter', in the sense that no one was getting into the weeds of what went on 25 years ago - so, as Time and others wrote, 'he was an Army officer during the Gulf War', which could have been elided by whomever the Wikipedia editor was to 'he was an officer in the Gulf War.' ..... Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:16, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Quite the range of excuses there. Plus a rather nasty accusation.

All of them rather miss the point - responsible organisations implement systems to catch and correct mistakes if it is deemed the potential impact of a mistake is large. It's all about risk assessment and doing what is reasonable, not merely doing what you want just because the law allows it.

And I'd say being denied a chance be Sec. State because some asswipe screwed with your Wikipedia biography seems a pretty big impact.

[Paul Bedson]

The Wikipedia system isn't designed to reward fact-checking and getting things right. It's a fatal flaw.