Case in point: Dinosaur Retired journalist finds biographical article on Wikipedia. The article points to him as a suspected assasin of Robert and John Kennedy. He becomes very upset, demands Wikipedia’s owners remove the offending information and delete it from the history files. He writes an editorial in USA Today. Then he begins a effort to find the real killers find the anonymous editor in order to “confront” them.
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia which anyone can edit. In this case an anonymous editor with a Bellsouth IP. When Seigenthaler saw the misinformation, why didn’t he just edit him himself instead of creating a huge stink about it? Note during an NPR interview, he was asked why he didn’t edit it. His answer was somewhat hypocritical saying it wasn’t his problem to edit Wikipedia. Listen to it here.
This time it was personal, after all he was a pallbearer in Bobby’s funeral. Before Seigenthaler probably didn’t even know or care what Wikipedia was. Suddenly it is an issue. Mainstream media is reporting that people can use the internet to post unverifiable information. Why is this a shock to people?
What is amazingly strange about this is Seigenthaler is founder of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt. Yep, I know the First Amendment doesn’t cover libel, but yet I don’t see why this is so much of an issue. Move on, John. Move on.
Wikipedia’s information process has been described by its founder, Jimmy Wales, as making a sausage. The outcome can be very tasty. But you really don’t want to see what goes on behind the scenes. I suspect Seigenthaler’s wiki article will be locked for quite some time because he has offended quite a few wiki users. It was bound to happen sometime. Wiki was around long enough for someone to find some disinformation, then sue Wikipedia for defamation of character.
==Update== 12/11/2005
The rogue editor has been revealed. But does anyone care?