Why no mention of the Parkland shooting media hoax?

[CrowsNest]

It got plenty of coverage at the time.....

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/ ... sts-415672

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-des ... d-shooting

.....so, a typical case of Wikipedia sloppiness, a conscious decision to exclude it as trivia, or something more sinister?

Without trawling the complete edit history, the sad reality of Wikipedia is that you can easily make a case for any of those three explanations.....

1. Wikipedians are just amateurs and the project lacks coordination, so basic ommissions like this can and do happen. It did after all develop while lots of other pieces about the shooting were coming in thick and fast.

2. They have also been known to decide that even if some detail of a story received in depth coverage in multiple outlets at the time, including it can still be a case of TRIVIA or a NOTNEWS violation. There's no way of predicting the outcome of such discussions, if indeed one even took place, since the guidelines are vague and editors have wildly different interpretations of them.

3. And finally, you can also pretty easily imagine the Wikipedians being awfully reluctant to highlight when their model breaks down, and they are unwitting parties to the spread of fake news - they did after all include in their article the information introduced to the media through this hoax.

[CrowsNest]

Oh look, Wikipedia spreading fake news....this article contains the exact, precise claims, passed to the media by the hoaxers, and has done since 27 February, when it was created.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Republic_of_Florida_(Militia)&oldid=828677777

No source, trying to cover their asses by saying "allegedly".

Even though the article has been marked for deletion for two days, with no less than seven different editors having opined in there, plus Drmies having his usual hack at it, not one of those Wikipediots has thought to remove the unsourced hoax derived information it contains. As always, you're torn between explaining this on simple grounds of incompetence, or the fact that they don't really care because the hoax information is only hurting the shooter. It could of course be used by his defence team to show he will never get a fair trial - all potential jurors could have read this on Wikipedia. A smart lawyer could easily prove that it isn't common knowledge that Wikipedia can contain any old shit.