A couple months ago, I introduced you to the Wikipedia article (now yanked) on Orange Julius namesake Julius Freed, which is full of all kinds of crazy trivia, like the fact that he invented a shower stall for pigeons. I was mostly interested in the article because (a) it had sat unchanged on Wikipedia for five years, and (b) it all seemed transparently phony to the trained eye.
I got two things wrong in the original piece: first, I said that only a mental_floss blogger had been fooled by the post. I totally missed the funniest development in this story: Dairy Queen, which now owns Orange Julius, inadvertently used the hoax material as the basis for a 2007 ad campaign! The ad firm space150 created a viral video on Julius Freed’s life, using all the amazing-but-true facts from the Wikipedia article. (Again, to review: they were amazing, but not true. So space150 was half-right.) Said creative director Riley Kane:
Our assignment was to push the original Orange Julius and we went to Wikipedia and found out about how he invented the pigeon shower… We couldn’t make anything that good up, so we decided to base the film on the real facts.
Jennings goes on to make two good points.
1) That Joe Cassara, the operations manager at a Miami public radio station created the hoax to demonstrate a hoax. Jennings asks if that is not a form of contaminating the sample?
2) However in creating the hoax, Jennings concludes that Cassara did prove that you can make-up information, have it sit in Wikipedia for five years and then have the company discussed in the article use the incorrect information as fact.
How many hundreds (thousands?) of other articles like this are sitting out in the Wiki-ether right now, wreaking havoc and just waiting to be debunked?
Of course, this does not mean that every entry in Wikipedia is simply incorrect, out of date, or someone trying to pull a fast one. It does point out the need that even more vigilant review from Wikipedia editors is required. As the corpus grows larger this becomes even more of a concern. Remember, the article we're discussing was in the database for five years before it was noticed.
At the same time users need to learn how to judge the quality of Wikipedia as a whole and if possible, also at the article level. Not easily done but important and something to strive for.
What's most amazing to us is that no one (reader/editor/researcher) didn't pick up the telephone or send an email to a specific person at the company to have the information either confirmed or denied. Is this laziness or people not knowing where to turn or what person(s) to contact? Even more curious is that Dairy Queen/Orange Julius didn't notice the article during the five year period and have it corrected or simply correct it themselves.
If the Internet has done anything it has made it much easier to get to a primary source of the information or to someone who has the responsibility to speak for the person, organization, or event.
I’ve since heard from a couple creative types at marketing firm space150, who say that both they and DQ/Orange Julius realized while working on the campaign that the Wikipedia article was full of fakery. Creative director Riley Kane:
Full disclosure, we were fooled at first, but Dairy Queen knew all along the Pigeon Shower stuff wasn’t real, and certain comments by them quickly revealed to me that while Julius Freed was indeed an amateur pigeon racer, he never built showers for them. Or inflatable shrimp traps, for that matter. Although, I must admit, I wanted to believe.
Jennings adds:
This changes the story from “gullible corporation believes Wikipedia prank about its own brand,” true, but I’d argue that it changes the story into something more interesting: “corporation intentionally pushes misinformation because its brand history is more interesting that way.
"There are a vast number of web sites where patients can obtain cancer information," said Yaacov Lawrence, assistant professor of Radiation Oncology at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University. "The purpose of this study was to answer one question: Is the cancer information on Wikipedia correct? Reassuringly, we found that errors were extremely rare on Wikipedia. But the way information was presented on PDQ is more patient-friendly."
Stories like this (not the study itself) scares us. Why? It gives a false impression that if one type of material, this case information about cancer is accurate (kudos Wikipedia!) that all content in Wikipedia is just as accurate and that is not true. Accuracy, currency, etc. in Wikipedia must be looked at one article/one page at a time. This has to be the case when you have thousands and thousands of contributors and editors.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
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The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
