Wikipedia Horror Story

John Seigenthaler Sr. was an aide to President Kennedy. He later became President of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and was an award-winning journalist for 43 years for The Tennessean, Nashville's morning newspaper. At his retirement he was editor, publisher and CEO of the Tennessean. In 1982, Seigenthaler became founding editorial director of USA TODAY and served in that position for a decade, retiring from both the Nashville and national newspapers in 1991. In 1986, Middle Tennessee State University established the "John Seigenthaler Chair of Excellence in First Amendment Studies," honoring Seigenthaler's "lifelong commitment to free expression values". He founded the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University in 1991.

Got all that? Well, someone created a Wikipedia biography page for Mr. Seigenthaler that implicated him in the Kennedy assassination and also gave the impression that he fled to Russia thereafter. All of this was, of course, untrue. However, it stayed on Wikipedia for six months, and the information was picked up by at least a couple of other websites.

Mr. Seigenthaler has written a piece in USA Today about his experience. Here is a Slashdot thread about this matter. Unfortunately, he seems to be angry with the internet service provider of the alleged author of the slanderous piece. I think his anger is misdirected-- first of all, the piece could have come from any computer on the internet, or from any person who happened to pick up a wi-fi signal from the ISP. As one slashdot poster put it: "In related news, road builders will from now on be sued if any crime is commited with help of a road" Second, Mr. Seigenthaler should have corrected the slanderous piece, instead of trying for revenge against the poster. Finally, as a champion of the First Amendment, Mr. Sigenthaler should probably be more aware of the risks of free speech-- one risk is that the free speech might not be true.

Still, he was slandered, falsely, and he seems to have no recourse.

As the creator of a wikipedia page, I have to admit that it would have been incredibly easy to just make up facts. When submitted my article I also created an account, giving information concerning my identity and my email address, but I'm sure I could have submitted false information if I had wanted to. I wrote that page in July of this year; the content is unchanged, although the "history" reveals that it was copy edited in October. (I can't figure out what was changed; it was very minor). That editor, if he had wanted to, could have changed the facts too.

Notably, the page for Mr. Seigenthaler has now been corrected; it even contains information about today's USA Today piece.