There’s a NYT article today about John Seigenthaler’s USA Today op-ed speaking against his Wikipedia page, which for a time contained false and defamatory information about his involvement in the Kennedy assassinations and other things. Excerpts from Seigenthaler’s article:
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.
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Wikipedia’s website acknowledges that it is not responsible for inaccurate information, but Wales, in a recent C-Span interview with Brian Lamb, insisted that his website is accountable and that his community of thousands of volunteer editors (he said he has only one paid employee) corrects mistakes within minutes.
My experience refutes that. My “biography” was posted May 26. On May 29, one of Wales’ volunteers “edited” it only by correcting the misspelling of the word “early.” For four months, Wikipedia depicted me as a suspected assassin before Wales erased it from his website’s history Oct. 5. The falsehoods remained on Answers.com and Reference.com for three more weeks.
I understand that it’s frustrating to see something Bad about yourself, whether in the papers or online or scribbled on a friend’s notebook. I don’t know what this is like when you’re someone who’s famous and there might actually be motivations for people to slander you. But honestly? It’s not Wikipedia’s problem. It’s really not. It doesn’t claim authority, and its content is only as good, or bad, or malicious, as its contributors. It’s “the free encyclopedia,” which means you don’t pay for it, and it’s unfettered by binds of strictly vetted truthfulness.
The reason no one corrected Seigenthaler’s page before was probably because no one else looking at the pages felt that they had the authority to - because no one else who was looking knew anything about him (I’d never heard of him before; granted I’m young, but so are a lot of Wikipedia users!). That’s my guess, anyway. The misspelling correction was probably made by a reader looking up Seigenthaler who just happened to notice it.
So here’s a question: Why didn’t Seigenthaler correct the page himself, as someone who’s the ultimate authority (see also here and here)? Isn’t it possible that the person who prepared the original page may not have even known his information was wrong? Maybe he heard a rumor, and didn’t bother to check it because he thought someone else would check it later. I have no idea how likely this is, but it seems at least plausible; we should perhaps at least not assume that the intention is libelous. The page was up for four months - as a reader and user of Wikipedia, one could argue that Seigenthaler had a responsibility to correct the information, since he knew better. Part of the compact of using wikis, at least ideologically, is that if you’re getting information from them you also have a responsibility to be a watchdog for false information. That’s the “community” aspect of it.
Now, people who take information straight from Wikipedia and do anything else with it (other than post on a blog, ahem), without consulting some other source, should get some education about what Wikipedia is and is not designed to be. That he found the information on Answers- and Reference.com is unfortunate, but perhaps if the page had been corrected sooner it wouldn’t have happened. I don’t know - do people wait until a Wikipedia page has sat relatively stably for a certain time before harvesting the entries for their “reference” sites? Ok, so I doubt they do, but theoretically that should be a way to weed out grossly fallacious info.
About this - trusting online sources, educating users - I agree with the NYT article:
All of this struck close to home for librarians and researchers. On an electronic mailing list for them, J. Stephen Bolhafner, a news researcher at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote, “The best defense of the Wikipedia, frankly, is to point out how much bad information is available from supposedly reliable sources.”
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“Instead of figuring out how to ‘fix’ Wikipedia - something that cannot be done to our satisfaction,” wrote Derek Willis, a research database manager at The Washington Post, who was speaking for himself and not The Post, “we should focus our energies on educating the Wikipedia users among our colleagues.”
So shift your expectations of the technology, not the technology. I don’t think it’s always the right stance, but here, I do.
