Although this Yahoo! article is ostensibly about Wikipedia's reliability -- or lack thereof -- the more important implication is really about how today's mainstream media does little more than cut and paste -- particularly stories which strike it as "too good to check":

When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

The sociology major's obituary-friendly quote -- which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28 -- flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia twice caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it.

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets they'd swallowed his baloney whole.

Wikipedia editors at least tried to remove the quote. Mainstream news reporters repeated the quote even though it had no attribution whatsoever. We're told that news outlets check sources, make phone calls, check facts, etc. Do they? This is a case where they didn't even bother to look for a purported source.

One might note, with appropriate irony, that I have simply cut and pasted the above onto my blog. I have, I freely admit, done no further research. You can't trust what's on blogs, right? Right. But please note that, apparently, in doing so, I did more research than The Guardian -- I at least ensured this came from Yahoo!, which claimed it came from AP. The Guardian, in contrast, reprinted a snippet of information from an anonymous Internet source.

Yessir: At Random Observations, we have more stringent controls than at The Guardian.