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Wikipedia wrongly blamed for Super Bowl gaffe; "digital natives" naive about Wikipedia; brief news

UK tabloid wrongly blames Wikipedia for US national anthem gaffe at Super Bowl

Performing at this year's Super Bowl (an American Football game on February 6 that was the most-watched US television program in history), singer Christina Aguilera mixed up the lyrics of the US national anthem, causing boos from the audience and subsequent media outrage. An article by the UK's Daily Mail claimed on the following day that she had been "singing botched lyrics found on Wikipedia". As proof, the tabloid presented a screenshot showing the wrong lyrics sung by Aguilera in the 23:52, 6 February 2011 (UTC) version of the article The Star-Spangled Banner (taken from the diff view of an edit correcting them at 23:59). It claimed "the mistake on the website, as seen hours before the Super Bowl and since fixed by a user, matches the mistake she sang". However, as was quickly pointed out by Wikipedians, the article's revision history indicates that the wrong lyrics had in fact first been inserted at 23:51 on February 6, i.e. after Aguilera's performance (in fact the immediately preceding edit at 23:50 consisted of removing a statement about the incident).

Several other news publications cited the Daily Mail's claim, including The Guardian [1] and The Age [2]. Wikimedia UK has requested a correction from the Daily Mail.[3] Jimbo Wales remarked: "I wonder how often we link to the Daily Mail as if it is actually a source for anything at all? The number of times we should do so is really quite small – for most things they are just useless".

The New York Times also mentioned Wikipedia in its coverage of the incident, but more correctly, highlighting Wikipedia's timeliness instead of its alleged unreliability: "Aguilera’s flub was heard by tens of millions of viewers. Twitter was immediately abuzz with talk of her mistake, and by the third quarter her Wikipedia page was changed to include the incident."

Students largely unaware of talk pages, version histories, NPOV and verifiability

A blog post from The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that "Wikipedia’s editing process is still a mystery to students", based on a study ("Young adults' credibility assessment of Wikipedia", appearing in this month's issue of Information Communication & Society) that had 210 US college students carry out information-finding tasks, such as: "You are helping your nephew with his homework. He needs a map of Charles Darwin's voyage around the globe, the entire voyage. Help him get such a map".

While 77% of the participants used Wikipedia at least once during the tasks, and most students appeared to know that Wikipedia content "comes from other regular Internet users like them", the study's authors (Ericka Menchen‐Trevino and Eszter Hargittai from Northwestern University) observed that

The CHE quoted Menchen-Trevino's "surprise" about these results for members of what is often called the "digital native" generation, and Hargittai as stating that "students learned what they did know about Wikipedia from professors and peers rather than from information available on the site itself", and that many of them increasingly "approach Wikipedia as a search engine."

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