Wikipedia Seigenthaler biography incident
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The John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy occurred after Brian Chase anonymously posted a hoax in the Wikipedia entry for John Seigenthaler Sr. in May 2005. In September, Victor S. Johnson, Jr., an old friend of Seigenthaler's, discovered the entry, which suggested that Seigenthaler may have had a role in the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. Demonstrably false statements in the article included claims that Seigenthaler lived in the Soviet Union from 1971 to 1984, and that he was the founder of a public relations firm. Seigenthaler's brother founded a public relations firm that bears the family name, but John Seigenthaler has no role in it.
After Johnson alerted him to the article, Seigenthaler emailed friends and colleagues about it. One colleague, Eric Newton from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, cut and pasted Seigenthaler's official biography into Wikipedia from the Freedom Forum web site on 23 September 2005. Newton's copyright infringement was soon replaced by a shorter biography that did not violate Wikipedia's policies. When Newton ran into Seigenthaler in November in New York at the Committee to Protect Journalists dinner, he told Seigenthaler he had replaced the vandalism with the copyright violation.
Seigenthaler himself contacted Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in October 2005, and Wales took the unusual step of having the false information hidden from the public in Wikipedia version logs. As a result, the unredacted versions of the article could be viewed only by Wikipedia administrators. The false statements were added on May 26, 2005 so they had remained uncorrected for almost four months. Several "mirror" websites not controlled by Wikipedia continued to display the inaccurate article for several weeks following Wikipedia's action. It is not known how many people actually saw the libelous entry before it was corrected.
On November 29, 2005, an op-ed article by Seigenthaler appeared in USA Today, describing the particulars of the incident. It included a verbatim reposting of the falsehoods in question:
- John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.
Seigenthaler detailed his own failed attempts to identify the person who posted the inaccurate biography to Wikipedia anonymously. He reportedly asked the poster's Internet service provider, BellSouth, to identify its user. He criticized Wikipedia for offering inaccurate material to a wide audience.
An expanded version was published several days later in The Tennessean where Seigenthaler was editor-in-chief in the 1970s.
Seigenthaler appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal with Brian Lamb hosting. He was concerned that other pranksters would try to spoof members of Congress or other powerful men in government and that it may then prompt a backlash and turn back First Amendment Rights on the Internet.
Anonymous editor identified
Daniel Brandt, a San Antonio-based privacy activist who had started the anti-Wikipedia "Wikipedia Watch" in response to problems he had with his eponymous article, found that the IP address used to create the false biography belonged to a BellSouth customer, and was the host to a website containing the text, "Welcome to Rush Delivery". He first made this information widely known on The Wikipedia Review public forum[1] (to which Jimmy Wales and Sollog also allegedly replied), then contacted the company, Seigenthaler and the media.
On December 9, Brian Chase, a 38 year-old operations manager at Rush Delivery in Nashville, admitted he had placed the allegations there to play a joke on a colleague. Chase then resigned from his job at Rush Delivery.
After receiving a hand-written apology and speaking with Chase on the phone, Seigenthaler decided he would not file a suit and urged Rush Delivery to rehire Chase.
One of Rush Delivery's clients was Seigenthaler's late brother Thomas, founder of Seigenthaler Public Relations. [2]
Reaction
The incident has garnered Wikipedia a great deal of coverage in the press, much of it unfavorable.
Brit Hume announced on Fox News's "Special Report" that false information linking Seigenthaler to the assassination of the 35th president had "finally been removed" from Wikipedia, which he characterized as "calling itself an encyclopedia", but which was "in fact an open site in which anyone can enter erroneous information and where factual errors abound".
In the USA Today article Seigenthaler makes the claim that Wikipedia is a "flawed and irresponsible research tool". Several other publications have commented on the incident, often criticizing Wikipedia (and the open editing model employed by the encyclopedia) as unreliable — with the Seigenthaler incident offered as proof.
Partly in response to this scandal, the scientific journal Nature published a study in December, 2005, in which Wikipedia was found to be similar in error rate to the Encyclopedia Britannica in scientific articles. [3] This suggests, the journal wrote, "that such high-profile examples (like the Seigenthaler and Curry situations) are the exception rather than the rule."
On December 5, 2005, Seigenthaler and Wales appeared jointly on CNN to discuss the matter. On December 6, 2005, the two were interviewed on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation radio program. There Wales described a new policy he implemented preventing unregistered users from creating new articles on the English-language Wikipedia, though they continued to be able to edit existing articles as before.
In the CNN interview, Seigenthaler also raised the spectre of increased government regulation of the Internet:
... Can I just say where I'm worried about this leading. Next year we go into an election year. Every politician is going to find himself or herself subjected to the same sort of outrageous commentary that hit me, and hits others. I'm afraid we're going to get regulated media as a result of that. And I, I tell you, I think if you can't fix it, both fix the history as well as the biography pages, I think it's going to be in real trouble, and we're going to have to be fighting to keep the government from regulating you.
Paradoxically, it was Seigenthaler himself that attacked Congress for passing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which protects ISPs and web sites from being held legally responsible for disseminating content provided by their customers and users.
In reaction to the controversy, New York Times business editor Larry Ingrassia sent out a memo to his entire staff commenting on the reliability of Wikipedia and writing, "We shouldn't be using it to check any information that goes into the newspaper." [4]
Since many people read Seigenthaler's op-ed, and few people responded to the original article, some [citation needed] Wikipedia contributors (known as Wikipedians) questioned his reluctance to simply correct the page. Other contributors pointed out the existence of an autobiography guideline on Wikipedia which is often interpreted to mean that users may not edit pages about themselves, and still others noted that even if he corrected the page, he would have to keep track of it for the rest of his life to be sure that inaccuracies were not added and compared opting-out of spam to the demand that Seigenthaler fix the inaccuracies himself.
Seigenthaler responded to this in an interview on NPR (National Public Radio). He said that he did not want to have anything to do with Wikipedia because he disapproved of its basic assumptions. He also pointed out that the false information had been online for several months before he was aware of it, and that he could not edit Wikipedia when he did not even know of the article's existence. Editing Wikipedia, he suggested, would lend it his sanction or approval. He believed that editing the article was not enough and instead wanted to expose what he thought were "incurable flaws" in the Wikipedia process and ethos. It is debatable whether the effects will be as he intended. Wikipedia received some adverse publicity, but also entered one of its strongest ever periods of usage growth. In mid-December it passed CNN.com in the Alexa rankings for the first time.
References
- Seigenthaler, John (29 November 2005). "A False Wikipedia 'biography'".
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|org=ignored (help) - Cooper, Charles (2 December 2005). "Wikipedia and the nature of truth".
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|org=ignored (help) - Seigenthaler, John (4 December 2005). "Truth can be at risk in the world of the web".
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|org=ignored (help) - Phillip, Kyra (5 December 2005). "Live From... Transcript".
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|org=ignored (help), interview with John Seigenthaler and Jimmy Wales. - Terdiman, Daniel (5 December 2005). "Growing pains for Wikipedia".
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|org=ignored (help) - Goodin, Dan (5 December 2005). "Wikipedia Tightens Submission Rules".
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|org=ignored (help) - Brandt, Daniel (5 December 2005). "Reports of the incident and discovery of Brian Chase".
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|org=ignored (help) - "Wikipedia to Require Contributors to Register". 6 December 2005.
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|org=ignored (help), Talk of the Nation story summary and radio broadcast. - Terdiman, Daniel (7 December 2005). "Is Wikipedia safe from libel liability?".
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|org=ignored (help) - Seelye, Katharine Q. (11 December 2005). "A Little Sleuthing Unmasks Writer of Wikipedia Prank".
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|org=ignored (help) - Mielczarek, Natalia (11 December 2005). "Fake online biography created as 'joke'".
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|org=ignored (help) - "Wikipedia joker eats humble pie". 12 December 2005.
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|org=ignored (help) - "Man Apologizes after Fake Wikipedia Post". 12 December 2005.
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|org=ignored (help) - "Wikipedia: a work in progress". 14 December 2005.
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|org=ignored (help) - Wikipedia history line for 23 September edit which first replaced problematic text with Freedom Forum First Amendment Center biography: "11:06, 23 September 2005 . . 69.172.115.157 (This is the correct bio. The previous entry was bogus.)"
- Newton, Eric (11 January 2006). "Wicked truths about Wikipedia show weakness of online encyclopedia".
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External links
- "There's no Wikipedia entry for 'moral responsibility'", The Register (UK)
- Is an Online Encyclopedia, Such as Wikipedia, Immune From Libel Suits? Under Current Law, the Answer Is Most Likely Yes, But that Law Should Change - Legal analysis of controversy by law professor, Anita Ramasastry on Writ
- Danah Boyd's take on the Seigenthaler incident, Corante.com