For going on two years, I’ve been a regular contributor to one of the greatest experiments in shared knowledge: the Wikipedia. When I first wrote about the site back in February 2004, I posited:
…the greatest danger to the Wikipedia’s success will be its success. Once the nerdy core of intelligent and generally well-meaning wikians is outpopulated by the generally boorish, annoying or outright hostile Vandals of the Internet, its days will be numbered. How long before the spammers discover how to Wiki and start sneaking in links to their commercial sites? Or wacko conspiracy theorists or neo-nazis manage to slip in misinformation as fact, just to see if they can?
Looks like my predictions are coming to pass. As Wikipedia’s popularity and usage has skyrocketed over the past year, so have its problems. While many of these, such as server overload and database crashes, amount to typical digital growing pains, the bigger ones— like falsification of information— go to the decentralized “open source” core of the project: there is no organization to the organization. Wikipedia is an attempt to bake a cake using countless chefs sticking their fingers into the mix. Unlike traditional reference works, such as print encyclopedias and newspapers, no one is actually responsible for making sure what goes into Wikipedia is “truthful.” There are no fact-checkers; everyone is supposed check their own facts. And that’s where the latest “scandal” has managed to take root.
John Seigenthaler in his office (AP)
An anonymous user did manage to create a fictional biography of an important, but not widely known figure, John Seigenthaler, Sr., journalist and one-time aide to Robert Kennedy. Seigenthaler was surprised (and rather incensed) to learn that his biography on Wikipedia claimed that he had been involved with the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and had lived in the Soviet Union for a decade.
On November 29, he wrote an opinion piece in USA Today expressing his frustration in correcting the libel against him. He called the entry “character assassination” and posited that a “sick mind conceived the false, malicious ‘biography.’” And he leveled the charge that Wikipedia was “populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects.”
If he were just a minor public persona— like Adam Curry, who has recently had his own Wikipedia “problems”— the charges might have slipped unnoticed, but Seigenthaler was the founding editor of USA Today and started The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, so when he talks about responsibility of the media, people tend to listen. The controversy has pushed its way from the online world into the New York Times and CNN.
Suddenly under scrutiny, founder Jimmy Wales has been having to answer for things that he has no control over: the content people post up on the site. One quick reform has come from the scandal, as non-registered users can no longer create new articles. Whether this is enough remains to be seen. Personally, I’d rather see Wikipedia start requiring registration to edit as well, allowing anonymous posts only in the discussion sections. That would solve 99% of the problems with vandalism and falsification.
