Michael Jackson's death roils Wikipedia
As news organizations reported Michael Jackson's hospitalization on Thursday afternoon, Wikipedia editors were wrestling with the problem of whether to allow an unverified report of the singer's death to appear on the online encyclopedia.
Michael Jackson, age 13, poses in his home in Encino, Calif., in 1972. He earned his first No. 1 solo record that year with "Ben."
(Credit: CBS)The entertainment site TMZ.com reported at 2:20 p.m. PDT that: "We're told when paramedics arrived Jackson had no pulse and they never got a pulse back."
Some Wikipedians repeatedly deleted references to Jackson's alleged demise, saying in separate comments that "This is not yet verified," "He's not dead," "Premature edits," and "ONCE AGAIN, HE IS NOT DEAD, JUST STOP."
But they were too slow for the legions of Wikipedia users who descended on the site and repeatedly modified the entry about the pop star. The typical edit was to insert Thursday as the date of Jackson's demise. Others were more subtle; one used the word "was" instead of "is," while another edit called "Invincible" his "last studio album."
By around 3:15 p.m. PDT, Wikipedia appeared to be temporarily overloaded. The site reported the error: "Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties... Cannot contact the database server: Unknown error (10.0.6.24))"
Plenty of blogs echoed TMZ's report, but news organizations tended to be more cautious. Fox News said Jackson's "condition wasn't immediately clear," while Reuters cited TMZ.
The Los Angeles Times initially reported that Jackson was in a coma, and then updated its story at 3:15 p.m. PDT to say: "Pop star Michael Jackson was pronounced dead by doctors this afternoon after arriving at a hospital in a deep coma, city and law enforcement sources told The Times." (The Times' Web server was overloaded and could only be reached intermittently.)
Around the same time, the Wikipedia editors had finally intervened in the edit-and-delete-the-edits scrum. One locked two articles about Jackson and his health for about six hours, which prevented them from being modified until the situation became more clear.
Declan McCullagh is a contributor to CNET News and a correspondent for CBSNews.com who has covered the intersection of politics and technology for over a decade. Declan writes a regular feature called Taking Liberties, focused on individual and economic rights; you can bookmark his CBS News Taking Liberties site, or subscribe to the RSS feed. You can e-mail Declan at declan@cbsnews.com. 
While he was never convicted of anything major, he was at very least, a wierdo and had troubling tendencies.
His death was no more a tragedy as any of the other hundreds of thousands of people who probably died yesterday.
Google "Rihanna fake photo TMZ"
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=Rihanna+fake+photo+TMZ&aq=f&oq=&aqi=&fp=OzgK0dwM7rU
Ironically, his death is similar to the death of Elvis, involving drugs to stay alive and poor health, and dying at home in his middle age.
Does the "Encylopedia that anyone can edit" now have specific editors assigned to specific pages...sounds like it.
Free speech is a priveledge but it doesn't entitle you to be irresponsible. One day you might grow up and understand that.
My grandma is a huge fan of this guy. After hearing that he had a cardiac arrest, she just wanted real-time info. To me going to wikipedia was like getting the true encyclopedic info that I always depend on. But to find a lot of wikipedians (yes I have an account with wikipedia) just constantly updating the Michael Jackson article just means that they just overload the network traffic. I am an eye-witness here. When I went to the Michael Jackson article, I saw a template above saying that "this article is constantly beign edited", and if you try to edit the article, you "may get an edit conflict message". So basically, I say: I really need to keep an eye on these big events.
Get a life
we always miss you
http://sibangor.blogspot.com/2009/06/michael-jackson-died.html
Should have known this would happen and wikipedia should have a grafitti page of loyal followers who usually more knowlegable than the person preventing the massive wikipedia spamming.
If it is trutful and news worthy keep it in but to outright within seconds or minutes deleting right way should mean the person deleting the content himself/herself turn off their computer and walk away.
Not sure why so many internet idiots just HAD to update his site that he died -- epically after the first reports were just from TMZ (might as well been reported via a Perez Hilton tweet).
I mean geeze, how "real time" does an ENCYCLOPAEDIA need to be? Let the man be officially pronounced dead for crying out loud, then simply update the page with the info. If these wikidots were not so narcissistic, there would not have been this story.
Cody
RIP Michael Jackson.
- by cheerleader9998212 June 26, 2009 9:56 AM PDT
- i dont really care he hurts kids now people who live on his street can walk up and down the side of there streets and noy be afraid to get attacked my mj hiding in da bushes
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- by viper396 June 29, 2009 12:30 PM PDT
- He hurts people? Really? Do you have proof of this? Because two separate proceedings and 14 individual jury members with actual evidence say otherwise. Does it make you feel better to demonize the man even after his death?
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (49 Comments)[CNET editors' note: Personal attack deleted.]