Irony can really make my day sometimes.
Turns out I wasn't the only person who thought the article that Reuters ran about Wikipedia responding to Kenneth Lay's death was a petty pile of garbage. (jasonunger.com and Wikipedia blog.) But the story just took a turn for wonderful.
Apparently getting accurate information is difficult for Reuters, too. They have since issued a correction to the article, after misidentifying the source of their information.
Wikipedia is a community edited encyclopedia. Not a news source. People don't check it for breaking news, and they shouldn't check it as a endpoint for authoritative information. If it takes a few minutes for new information to be incorporated into a Wikipedia article, that is understandable, even expected. Reuters, on the other hand, fits into a different niche. They should be a source of reliable, authoritative, and unbiased information, exactly what their original article isn't.
On a related note... Question of the day: how long will it be before the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Kenneth Lay reflects his death?
(Found the correction via)
