Tech Shout!

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin has fired its entertainment reporter Tim Ryan following an investigation into his stories which seemed to be ‘too inspired’ by Wikipedia content.

According to Editor Frank Bridgewater, Ryan’s stories contained phrases or sentences that appeared elsewhere before being included, unattributed, in stories that ran in the Star-Bulletin.

Ryan had been working with the paper since 1984 and his copies on stories that are stored on the starbulletin.com have been changed.

The whole lot was spotted by Wikipedia editors who noticed that language used in one of Ryan’s stories about Aloha Flight 243 closely matched a Wikipedia article. He was spotted because the man who wrote the Wikipedia entry came across Ryan’s story on news aggregator Fark.com.

Ryan told his boss that he got the information from Reference.com rather than directly from Wikipedia. The paper said it would have to run a proper attribution, and promptly did so.

Apparently Ryan borrowed content from other online sources including a 7 June 2005 review of the Toyota Highlander hybrid SUV. This thereby came from an article in the Sacramento Bee by Mark Glover, from 15 April 2005.

Another case involved an interview printed in 17 December 2004 which matched another conducted by another journalist in 2003. What made the firing fascinating was that it did not happen immediately after Wikipedia complained, but only after other news agencies started to run stories
based on Wikipedia’s side of the story here.

It seems that Bridgewater felt that there was going to be a little to much heat on this case and chose the wordsmith.