This kind of dealing in bad faith reflects poorly on the site. I remember Foulpointe piquing my curiosity several years ago and spending the better part of a day looking into it both on and offline. I came up empty-handed, and after that I just kind of moved on to the next thing. I suppose if I'd really been hot for the long-lost Lido of Madagascar (I'm surprised I dropped it, actually) the next step would have been to contact Mr. MacWood--would he have then told me that the list was fictional? Would I have had an easy time reaching him? What if I were working on a tight deadline?
If I'd looked into it, maybe I would have come up with some verification--because I have an account here. But many writers do not, and that's to say nothing of the fact that many writers aren't solely responsible for their own fact-checking. GolfClubAtlas doesn't have formal protocols in place to assist other media in verifying information. I'm not sure there's even an email address for interested outside parties to contact either GCA or its contributing authors.
I don't think the original goal of this piece was to make professional writers and news organizations look bad--more likely it was just an unintended consequence that turned out to hold some kind of perverse fascination as time passed. GCA is routinely referenced in the wider world--both with and without citation, it's true--but if this site really stood behind its work, there would be some kind of mechanism in place to expedite fact-checking. Who wants to start fielding those phone calls? Show of hands?
It just comes down to what this site is or wants to be. Everyone knows it's influential, but is it responsible? (I think Uncle Ben said something to Peter Parker about that.) Maybe leaving this turd in the punchbowl was a nifty way of actually elevating GCA by lowering confidence in others. I will say this, though--if I'm one of the many other authors who have contributed accurate, meticulously researched work to this website--or even Macwood himself, who has done a great deal of what I've deemed impressive work himself--I'd be pretty pissed off, because guess what? Your work basically looks like shit now, too--until the fact checkers prove otherwise, that is.
Unless I'm taking all of this too seriously, and the point I should walk away with is that GCA is not, in fact, a place that promotes "frank commentary on golf course architecture." Are hoaxes "frank commentary"?