Conner

I know what you are thinking…How could a guy who really seems like more of a fairy be a vampire? I mean REALLY?

Let me point out first that the above statement and some more of this article may be considered offensive to some people. Oh, and let me point out that I really don’t care. I actually will make a solid point and connection to this whole thing at some point here trust me.

Journalistic Integrity: Anyone Can Write Anything

We have been discussing in class how important information is to human culture and how the way it is being transferred is being revolutionized. Sometimes in the news it is better to be first than right. It also seems that sometimes in the news people do not care about the concept that an opinion without factual support is not fact and does not mean much.

Back in the beginning of last December, an article was published in the Washington Pennsylvania Observer-Reporter by a “journalist” named John Steigerwald that caused a bit of controversy. Steigerwald wrote about how he believed that Alexander Ovechkin (a hockey player for the Washington Capitals) was having a bad year statistically because he had previously been on steroids and stopped which caused his drop off. He claimed that a doctor who was recently busted for giving steroids to athletes, who did have a connection to the Washington Capitals at some point, had been supplying Ovechkin with performance enhancing drugs. He published this article with no evidence. He had no proof of any sort and later claimed he wrote the article based on hearsay. This article blew up the Hockey blogosphere with excitement because it was utterly ridiculous.

The point I am making with this, is that even people who are seen as credible make terrible and frankly stupid decisions. I think that this is important to think about when considering a wikipedia page. It is possible that even the articles used as sources on wikipedia cannot always be fully trusted. When using wikipedia it is always best to fact check.

Ryan Lambert from the Yahoo! Sports blog Puckdaddy, went on the radio with John Steigerwald to talk about how ridiculous these claims were. In this radio interview (which the majority of is a trainwreck) Lambert points out that he has just as much evidence to say that Sidney Crosby is a vampire as Steigerwald has to say Ovechkin used steroids and honestly, he has some really solid points.

If you want to listen to the vampire part go to the 17:45 mark into this video as well as the last 5 seconds :

Let me point out that this was the talk of the Hockey world for at least a week. Hockey fans happen to be very in tune with social media including blogs and twitter.

So now that all of that is out of the way, I want to look at Sidney Crosby’s Wikipedia page and Alex Ovechkin’s at the time of this. I went ahead and looked at the editing as well as the discussion for both of these players at this time and guess what???

NOTHING

There isn’t a single case of someone editing in that Crosby is a Vampire or that Ovechkin used steroids. There is also no discussion on it. To me this was really strange. When I started to look into what I wanted to do for this blog post I wanted to write about how I assumed people chose to edit Crosby’s or Ovechkin’s pages during all of this and there is nothing. Even to this day there is no mention of anything. This is fascinating to me.

Even though all this is true, if you go to their pages, you will see that they are cited very well.

The Audience

In the end I really think the reason for the lack of mention of all of this is the audience involved. Looking at the wikipedia pages of these two athletes it becomes clear that there is never much activity on the editing side or discussion side.  If you go back about 8 years ago, you can see that there were many more revisions of insults for both players and that it has been declining as the years passed.  I think it shows possibly that Hockey fans don’t care as much or maybe it says that the world doesn’t care enough about hockey. Considering the pages are also not updated with statistics as regularly as someone might assume, I guess I can assume that the world is just less interested in the sport. Which makes me sad.

I really do hope this was helpful to someone. I hope that someone else can see that the amount of editing or even insulting on a wikipedia page is largely due to how much people care about the subject. And also that wikipedia has the ability to be edited and fixed unlike a newspaper article or radio interview. Yes, you can go back and look at the changes people have made to a wikipedia page over time but I don’t think the majority of people take that as seriously as something printed.

If you want to learn more about Crosby the Vampire or Ovechkin the steroid user, Google it. There are discussions about it all over the internet.

I honestly cannot believe I just did this blog post on all of this but I stuck with it.