Sherry Chandler

Some malicious poster put a false biography of John Seigenthaler, Sr. on Wikipedia. Apparently it was up there for several months before Seigenthaler himself saw it and cried foul. The bio has been corrected now, with links to the op-ed below and other articles discussing this event.

from A False Wikipedia Biography by John Seigenthaler:

At age 78, I thought I was beyond surprise or hurt at anything negative said about me. I was wrong. One sentence in the biography was true. I was Robert Kennedy’s administrative assistant in the early 1960s. I also was his pallbearer. It was mind-boggling when my son, John Seigenthaler, journalist with NBC News, phoned later to say he found the same scurrilous text on Reference.com and Answers.com.

I had heard for weeks from teachers, journalists and historians about “the wonderful world of Wikipedia,” where millions of people worldwide visit daily for quick reference “facts,” composed and posted by people with no special expertise or knowledge — and sometimes by people with malice.

At my request, executives of the three websites now have removed the false content about me. But they don’t know, and can’t find out, who wrote the toxic sentences.

…

Naturally, I want to unmask my “biographer.” And, I am interested in letting many people know that Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool.

…

When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of “gossip.” She held a feather pillow and said, “If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That’s how it is when you spread mean things about people.”

For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia.

from Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar:

Wikipedia is a kind of collective brain, a repository of knowledge, maintained on servers in various countries and built by anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection who wants to share knowledge about a subject. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have written Wikipedia entries.

Mistakes are expected to be caught and corrected by later contributors and users.

The whole nonprofit enterprise began in January 2001, the brainchild of Jimmy Wales, 39, a former futures and options trader who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla. He said he had hoped to advance the promise of the Internet as a place for sharing information.

It has, by most measures, been a spectacular success. Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages. The number of articles, already close to two million, is growing by 7 percent a month. And Mr. Wales said that traffic doubles every four months.

Still, the question of Wikipedia, as of so much of what you find online, is: Can you trust it?

…

Some cyberexperts said Wikipedia already had a good system of checks and balances. Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford and an expert in the laws of cyberspace, said that contrary to popular belief, true defamation was easily pursued through the courts because almost everything on the Internet was traceable and subpoenas were not that hard to obtain. (For real anonymity, he advised, use a pay phone.)

“People will be defamed,” he said. “But that’s the way free speech is. Think about the gossip world. It spreads. There’s no way to correct it, period. Wikipedia is not immune from that kind of maliciousness, but it is, relative to other features of life, more easily corrected.”

Indeed, Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0 and a longtime Internet analyst, said Wikipedia may, in that sense, be better than real life.

“The Internet has done a lot more for truth by making things easier to discuss,” she said. “Transparency and sunlight are better than a single point of view that can’t be questioned.”

Two views of gossip.

I link to Wikipedia a lot here, and will probably continue to do so, because I tend to be a small d democrat and I like the idea of a free exchange of knowledge. I also believe that crime victims should not be allowed to make law because they are not objective. So when Mr. Seigenthaler criticizes legal protections in place for Internet Service Providers, I am sympathetic. I might be more sympathetic if I had any kind of reputation or place in history to protect. But I think he’s wrong.

I also trust that my readers will understand that you always double-check the truth of things you read on the Internet. But the Internet is not the only place where you’re likely to find lies, skewed facts, or defamation. The United States, with its strong free speech protections, has always made libel more difficult to prosecute than European countries. I’m in no hurry to change that.

A very dear old friend who was a local politician used to say that he didn’t care what people said about him as long as they were talking about him at all. What he feared was the day when they stopped talking about him. All publicity is good publicity.

[Addendum: Wikipedia is one thing, and then there's wikipoetry. But the LATimes apparently recently experimented with wiki-editorials, and I just didn't understand how that would work at all. And neither, apparently, did they, because they dropped the idea almost immediately.]