Geographic Ignorance and Information Quality
Can federal agencies learn from newspapers' correction practices?
27 Sep 2006 in Information Quality
According to the September 26 Washington Post column "Hidden in Plain View," young adults have disturbingly limited geographic knowledge. Apparently the Post made one too. Unlike federal agencies, however, the Post fessed up on its corrections page. Maybe federal agencies should have corrections pages like newspapers do.
The Information Quality Act is about avoiding error if at all possible, and correcting errors that occur as soon as possible after the fact. This is especially important for federal agencies because when they disseminate information, oftentimes it's highly influential. Federal agencies might benefit from adopting newspapers' practice of printing corrections in a common format at a well-known location.
The story begins with a graphic that looks like this:
Geography?
Not Our Strongest Subject
The graphic illustrates selected geographic knowledge of a sample of 18 to 24 year olds obtained from the National Geographic Education Foundation. The figures reported are disturbing because they imply extraordinary ignorance of basic geographic facts.
Another troubling aspect of these data is that they show deterioration since the last survey in 2002, despite the fact that the countries involved appear in the news every day:
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Percent of 18-24 Year Olds Unable to Locate Selected States and Countries
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| 2006 | 2002 | |
| % Locating Ohio | 57% (p. 28) | 65% (p. 13) |
| % Locating New York | 50% (p. 28) | 51% (p. 13) |
| % Locating Afghanistan | 88% (p. 22) | 88% (p. 7) |
| % Locating Israel | 75% (p. 25) | 86% (p. 7) |
| % Locating Iran | 75% (p. 25) |
87% (p. 7) |
| % Locating Iraq | 63% (p. 25 | 87% (p. 7) |
| % Locating Egypt | 70% (p. 26) | N/A |
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Sources: |
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We mention Egypt because the original graphic apparently included evidence that young adults cannot locate that country as well. But that part of the graphic was removed from the print edition of the Post delivered to Neutral Source's driveway and it is no longer available online.
Why? Here is a correction printed in the September 27th edition:
- On a map with the Sept. 26 Hidden in Plain View feature, Sudan was mislabeled as Egypt.
Oops.
We don't mean to ridicule the Post. Everyone makes misteaks. And editors can't be expected to prevent every error from appearing in print, though in this case the editor who thought Sudan was Egypt might need a refresher course over at the National Geographic Society. But newspaper editors are like peer reviewers and they are expected to catch at least obvious errors. (Scholarly peer reviewers are often castigated for failing to detect errors that sometimes cross the line to fraud, but that's almost certainly harder for peer reviewers to do than for newspaper editors to detect fraud by reporters under their supervision.)
Newspapers long ago adopted the convention of publishing corrections at a fixed location in every edition. Oftentimes this fixed location is not very prominent (the Post's corrections appear on page 2), and almost always the correction is not nearly as prominent as the original error
Still, Neutral Source wonders whether federal agencies ought to publish corrections on a single page directly accessible via a link prominently displayed on their home pages. We are unaware of any federal agency that acknowledges its errors, much less does so even as prominently as a daily newspaper.
