A New York Times First? Wikipedia Cited as a News Source

Mediaite.com

The New York Times Magazine this weekend features a profile about three generations of the comedic Elliott family. But one aspect of the writing of the story seems a bit funny...

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The quality of the NY Times has been in free fall for years. I stopped buying the newspaper a long time ago due to its total lack of quality control.

I used a 1998 NYT obituary as a source for an article I wrote on WP. However two details contradicted the information I found on IMDb and elsewhere on the internet, namely the release year of The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (about Nostradamus), and the authorship of its screenplay.

Never exactly sure whom to believe, I erred on the side of caution and left out this information, yet somebody else added it anyway.

That reminds me, I was supposed to write Mr. Holcomb Noble a letter last summer asking for clarification, but it completely slipped my mind.

The IMDb is correct in regard to the release date and screenplay authorship.

Hmm... I'm not so sure this is as bad as the headline makes it out to be. The phrase "a comedic lineage that spans across three centuries" in the otherwise-fine Raymond Knight (radio) (T-H-L-K-D) article isn't a substantive fact, it's more of an interpretation of already-known facts, and clearly it's not "news." It's also a misinterpretation, in that the precise beginning date of the family's "comedic lineage" should - at best - be Raymond Knight's first performances of comedy routines on radio, rather than his date of birth. In some respects this might be deemed "original research," actually:
So this claim of a "lineage" is tenuous at best. Knight's only real connection to the Elliott family was through his wife, who only married an Elliott after his (Knight's) death - so really, under the proper definition of the word "lineage," the earliest date should be the DOB of Lee Knight, not Raymond Knight. I'm actually mystified why anyone would make such an assertion - there doesn't seem to be any encyclopedic value in doing so...?

However, the Mediaite article is also wrong, in that it credits Woohookitty (T-C-L-K-R-D) with the insertion of the material quoted above, when in fact the material in question was added by the article's original author, Pepso2 (T-C-L-K-R-D) , in this edit, which immediately followed Woohookitty's trivial edit. Indeed, I suspect Woohookitty, an experienced WP'er, would actually agree with me about the "OR" nature of the quoted material. (To be fair, someone finally did notice this error in this comment, though I had to scroll down quite a ways to find it! And still, that commenter doesn't mention that "Pepso2" wrote most of the article, and still gets it wrong by suggesting that Woohookitty actually did write the first half of the paragraph! )

Probably the most telling thing we can take from this incident is that you can write a perfectly good Wikipedia article, fill it with all sorts of well-sourced facts, format it nicely, and defend it from vandalism, and when the world's (arguably) most important newspaper finally takes notice of it, they'll quote the one part of the article that's wrong, and then someone else will credit the whole thing to some guy who came along and made one minor unrelated correction.

And of course, Jimbo Wales will still be the one getting his photo in the newspapers, and will also be paid tens of thousands of dollars to speak to various think-tanks and international business symposiums about how great this all is for everyone concerned.