“That Wikipedia is a Flawed and Irresponsible Research Tool."
This is what John Seigenthaler, a retired journalist, said in response to reading his biography on Wikipedia (according to yesterday’s NYT). The biography stated that “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”. He was further infuriated to discover that this and other false propositions in the Wikipedia entry were quoted in Reference.com and Answers.com. (These services apparently are programmed to copy and paste Wikipedia entries.)
In a USA Today op-ed Seigenthaler describes last week his long attempt to track down and ‘unmask’ his anonymous biographer, which ended up in the discovery that this person is protected by federal privacy laws.
One of the outcomes of the incident is that this coming January Wikipedia will facilitate a review mechanism that will subject the entries to the rating of readers and experts.
John Seigenthaler ended his op-ed piece with these words:
When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of "gossip." She held a feather pillow and said, "If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That's how it is when you spread mean things about people."
For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia.
This probably won’t be a huge comfort to Mr. Seigenthaler, but the new (and corrected) Wikipedia entry about him includes a link to his USA Today op-ed.
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