Comments on: Employee fired for updating Wikipedia

By: Nicholas Stix

Nicholas Stix — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:17:03 +0000

“His death wasn’t news: his death was a private tragedy. We ghoulishly made it news.”

Nonsense. He was one of the world’s biggest newsmen; of course, his death was news. Or haven’t you noticed the outpouring of MSM puff encomia remembering him?

By: Arwel

Arwel — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:40:16 +0000

As an Administrator on Wikipedia, I’m sorry if someone got fired for editing a Wikipedia article, however it has to be said that the edit should never have been made in the first place – it was a breach of Wikipedia’s own rules that it is a secondary source and you only report what can be verified elsewhere. Wikipedia’s not in the business of being the first to report the news, though it is extremely useful for synthesising what’s been reported in other media.

By: Sam

Sam — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:30:26 +0000

I read this CrunchGear post several times looking for a valid point. Not a single one.

You blame NBC for not being able to get in touch with family immediately? You blame NBC for an IBC employee reversing its first posting? You blame NBC for an IBC employee being fired (which apparently didn’t even happen)?

By: Kirk Sandall

Kirk Sandall — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:32:53 +0000

OK, I can see why you wanted to post this story, someone getting fired in a way that’s related to wikipedia is just too good to miss. Particularly for a non-news site like CrunchGear that depends on scraping items from real journalists and inserting piffy comments to “add value”. You reveal your lack of knowledge about journalism, along with your left wing bent, when you knee jerk your way to blame the Big Dumb Corporation for not understanding how the interwebs work and firing our poor innocent new media reporter for simply stating the facts on Wikipedia.

The truth is that anyone who works for a news organization has to comply with a few, fairly reasonable, codes of contact. One of which is that you don’t report for other organizations. Seems fairly straightforward to me. If an NBC News employee, no matter how junior, decided to tip of CNN there’d be no question about them getting fired. Why not wikipedia?

The article is also insensitive with regard to NBC holding the story until they notified Tim Russert’s family, implying that this was unfair to the rest of us and that this huge company should have been able to pick up the phone and call them. That’s clearly ridiculous. NBC News doesn’t tag it’s employees families so they can be traced at all times. I’m sure they tried to arrange for a friend to tell the immediate family in person, instead of the impersonal phone call that you seem to thing would be adequate. In this case it turns out Mr Russert’s wife and son were traveling in Europe, it took some time to locate them and arrange for the bad news to be delivered in the most sensitive manner possible.

This article amounts to non-News; it’s poorly written, insensitive, naive, and worthless.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:23:03 +0000

They had been on vacation in Paris. He had come back early to tape Meet the Press. His wife and son were still over in Paris. This is why they wanted to not release it.

He was taping voice overdubs for the intro of the show, when he collapsed and died.

-Chuck