Snared in the Web of Wikipedia Liar

[Christiern]

REWRITING HISTORY

December 4, 2005

Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

A

CCORDING to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, John Seigenthaler Sr. is 78 years old and the former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville. But is that information, or anything else in Mr. Seigenthaler's biography, true?

The question arises because Mr. Seigenthaler recently read about himself on Wikipedia and was shocked to learn that he "was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby."

"Nothing was ever proven," the biography added.

Mr. Seigenthaler discovered that the false information had been on the site for several months and that an unknown number of people had read it, and possibly posted it on or linked it to other sites.

If any assassination was going on, Mr. Seigenthaler (who is 78 and did edit The Tennessean) wrote last week in an op-ed article in USA Today, it was of his character.

The case triggered extensive debate on the Internet over the value and reliability of Wikipedia, and more broadly, over the nature of online information.

Wikipedia is a kind of collective brain, a repository of knowledge, maintained on servers in various countries and built by anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection who wants to share knowledge about a subject. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have written Wikipedia entries.

Mistakes are expected to be caught and corrected by later contributors and users.

The whole nonprofit enterprise began in January 2001, the brainchild of Jimmy Wales, 39, a former futures and options trader who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla. He said he had hoped to advance the promise of the Internet as a place for sharing information.

It has, by most measures, been a spectacular success. Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages. The number of articles, already close to two million, is growing by 7 percent a month. And Mr. Wales said that traffic doubles every four months.

Still, the question of Wikipedia, as of so much of what you find online, is: Can you trust it?

And beyond reliability, there is the question of accountability. Mr. Seigenthaler, after discovering that he had been defamed, found that his "biographer" was anonymous. He learned that the writer was a customer of BellSouth Internet, but that federal privacy laws shield the identity of Internet customers, even if they disseminate defamatory material. And the laws protect online corporations from libel suits.

He could have filed a lawsuit against BellSouth, he wrote, but only a subpoena would compel BellSouth to reveal the name.

In the end, Mr. Seigenthaler decided against going to court, instead alerting the public, through his article, "that Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool."

Mr. Wales said in an interview that he was troubled by the Seigenthaler episode, and noted that Wikipedia was essentially in the same boat. "We have constant problems where we have people who are trying to repeatedly abuse our sites," he said.

Still, he said, he was trying to make Wikipedia less vulnerable to tampering. He said he was starting a review mechanism by which readers and experts could rate the value of various articles. The reviews, which he said he expected to start in January, would show the site's strengths and weaknesses and perhaps reveal patterns to help them address the problems.

In addition, he said, Wikipedia may start blocking unregistered users from creating new pages, though they would still be able to edit them.

The real problem, he said, was the volume of new material coming in; it is so overwhelming that screeners cannot keep up with it.

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."

Jessica Baumgart, a news researcher at Harvard University, wrote that there were librarians voluntarily working behind the scenes to check information on Wikipedia. "But, honestly," she added, "in some ways, we're just as fallible as everyone else in some areas because our own knowledge is limited and we can't possibly fact-check everything."

In an interview, she said that her rule of thumb was to double-check everything and to consider Wikipedia as only one source.

"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."

Some cyberexperts said Wikipedia already had a good system of checks and balances. Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford and an expert in the laws of cyberspace, said that contrary to popular belief, true defamation was easily pursued through the courts because almost everything on the Internet was traceable and subpoenas were not that hard to obtain. (For real anonymity, he advised, use a pay phone.)

"People will be defamed," he said. "But that's the way free speech is. Think about the gossip world. It spreads. There's no way to correct it, period. Wikipedia is not immune from that kind of maliciousness, but it is, relative to other features of life, more easily corrected."

Indeed, Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0 and a longtime Internet analyst, said Wikipedia may, in that sense, be better than real life.

"The Internet has done a lot more for truth by making things easier to discuss," she said. "Transparency and sunlight are better than a single point of view that can't be questioned."

For Mr. Seigenthaler, whose biography on Wikipedia has since been corrected, the lesson is simple: "We live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research, but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects."

[Ron S]

So how much of this can we trust?

[Epithet]

I'm struck by how amateurish a lot of the stuff on Wikipedia is.

[Christiern]

Yes, there is amateurish input, but I think that is inevitable when one considers the nature of the beast. When I found myself in there, I made a few corrections, but my bio was remarkably accurate. I have since edited and added to listings in areas where I have solid information, for example the bios of Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Lonnie Johnson, et al. I frequently return to those for the purpose of adding more info (and checking for errors).

The problem is--as the article points out--that anyone can go in there and make changes without registering. I'm glad to hear that they are addressing that problem. I think the set-up is very well thought out, allowing one to see changes and compare them to earlier input.

[JSngry]

Love the concept, and am glad to see it being refined. Let it evolve through its various growing pains. And yes, consider it as only one source. That's good policy, period, not just with Wikipedia.

[Claude]

Fake online biography created as 'joke'

[Big Al]

So how much of this can we trust?

None of it, of course, since it makes no mention of his producing my big comeback album in 1970......

[7/4]

Joe Lieberman's entry should be fixed to reflect his true colors.

[Kalo]

I've found that the most useful part of Wikipedia is the links to other sites included in the articles.

[Nate Dorward]

I think what I'd say is that I have found many supposedly accurate standard reference books to be chockfull of errors or stupidities: it's not just Wikipedia's problem. & with Wikipedia, if you find there's an error, it's simple: fix it yourself. I've written chunks of various articles (the one on Erstwhile Records is still mostly my handiwork e.g., & I tried to make the Philip Larkin & Charlie Parker ones better a while back though they have since evolved considerably).

Edited December 12, 2005 by Nate Dorward

[couw]

Nate is right, so Nature says:

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html

"Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries"

[Claude]

Besides the risk of having entries in Wikipedia which are inaccurate or deliberately wrong, there is also the danger of users committing copyright infringements by copying text from books:

Free Encyclopedia Wikipedia.de Has Copyright Issues (Deutsche Welle 29.11.2005)

Edited December 15, 2005 by Claude

[Son-of-a-Weizen]

I hear that Hardbop is trying hard to access Albertson's profile in order to mess with 'Bess.'

[Christiern]

I hear that Hardbop is trying hard to access Albertson's profile in order to mess with 'Bess.'

Sock it tome?

[AllenLowe]

I think I'll go in and correct Ron S's entry - they forgot to mention that murder conviction - but hey, killing 6 children doesn't necessarily make him a bad person -

[Aggie87]

I hear that Hardbop is trying hard to access Albertson's profile in order to mess with 'Bess.'

Sock it tome?

....Bonus points awarded to Chris for perfect use of "tome".

[Epithet]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_scientist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tipping

With less garbage the editors might stand a chance. (Who am I kidding? What editors?)

I bet those articles sampled by Nature aren't nearly obscure enough to reveal the crap.

[Rosco]

At the risk of this thread being moved to the political forum...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4695376.stm

Congress 'made Wikipedia changes'

By Matthew Davis

BBC News, Washington

Online reference site Wikipedia blames US Congress staff for partisan changes to a number of political biographies.

Computers traced to Capitol Hill removed unpalatable facts from articles on senators, while other entries were "vandalised", the site said.

An inquiry was launched after staff for Democratic representative Marty Meehan admitted polishing his biography.

Wikipedia is produced by readers who add entries and edit any page, and has become a widely-used reference tool.

Using the public history of edits on Wikipedia, researchers collected the internet protocol numbers of computers linked to the US Senate and tracked the changes made to online pages.

The site lists half a dozen prominent biographies that had been changed by Senate computers, including those of Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman, California Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa.

Senator Coleman's office has confirmed that staff there had made a number of changes to his online record.

Where he was described as a "liberal" back in college, this was changed to "activist".

Among other changes, staff also deleted a reference to Mr Coleman voting with President Bush 98% of the time in 2003, despite running as a moderate the year before.

Wikipedia said staffers of Senator Tom Harkin had removed a paragraph relating to Mr Harkin's having falsely claimed to have flown combat missions over North Vietnam, and his subsequent recantation.

A handful of miscellaneous vandalism edits had been made to some senators' articles, it said.

One example was the entry for Republican Senator Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma, who it was falsely alleged had been voted "most annoying senator".

Senator Coleman's chief of staff, Erich Mische, said editing was done to correct inaccuracies and delete information that was not reflective of the politician.

"They've got an edit provision on there for the sake of editing when things are not accurate," Mr Mische told the Associated Press.

"I presume that if they did not want people to edit, they wouldn't allow you to edit."

Wikipedia says the controversy raises questions about whether it is ethical for those with a vested interest in the subject to edit entries about it.

It said the Congressional computer network has been blocked from editing for brief periods on a number of occasions in the last six months due to the inappropriate contributions.

The article on President Bush has been altered so many times - not just from within Congress - that Wikipedia's volunteer monitors have had to block further "editing".

But it also says its investigation showed the vast majority of edits from Senate IPs were "beneficial and helpful".

Massachusetts newspapers disclosed last month that staffers for Representative Marty Meehan had polished the boss's Wikipedia biography.

Deleted were references to a long-abandoned promise to serve only four terms, and to his campaign war chest.

Wikipedia was founded in 2001 and has since grown to more than 1.8 million articles in 200 languages. Some 800,000 entries are in English.

It is based on wikis, open-source software which lets anyone fiddle with a webpage. Anyone reading a subject entry can disagree, edit, add, delete, or replace the entry.

A December 2005 study by the British journal Nature found it was about as accurate on science as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

But it has been criticised for the correctness of entries, most recently over the biography of prominent US journalist John Seigenthaler - which incorrectly linked him to the Kennedy assassinations.

[GA Russell]

USA Today had a similar article yesterday.

For the benefit of those here not of the USA, the article indicated that the naughty doings are all by staffers of members of the Democratic party. The article cited one example of puffery (the Democratic Markey of Massachusetts) and three or four insulting sabotagings of the biographies of Republicans.

No indication that the Republicans are hip to Wikipedia.

[AllenLowe]

I'm going to go through Wikipedia and add "pedophile" to all Republican bios - hey, even if I'm right only 80% of the time, it will still help -

[king ubu]

Is this new news in the US? Was in the newspapers last week, or even the week before, over here. Now let's start working on Allen's biography, everybody!

[AllenLowe]

hey, if the girl says she's under 12, I walk away -

[ejp626]

USA Today had a similar article yesterday.

For the benefit of those here not of the USA, the article indicated that the naughty doings are all by staffers of members of the Democratic party. The article cited one example of puffery (the Democratic Markey of Massachusetts) and three or four insulting sabotagings of the biographies of Republicans.

No indication that the Republicans are hip to Wikipedia.

Norm Coleman is a Republican.

I suspect most of the staffers on both sides of the aisle know about Wikipedia. While on the one hand, it is hard to imagine senior members of Congress knowing about blogs or Wikipedia, the one thing these guys care about is their public image. Many of them hire staff to track how they are represented in the media, and I imagine that has been extended to the Web.

[king ubu]

USA Today had a similar article yesterday.

For the benefit of those here not of the USA, the article indicated that the naughty doings are all by staffers of members of the Democratic party. The article cited one example of puffery (the Democratic Markey of Massachusetts) and three or four insulting sabotagings of the biographies of Republicans.

No indication that the Republicans are hip to Wikipedia.

Norm Coleman is a Republican.

I suspect most of the staffers on both sides of the aisle know about Wikipedia. While on the one hand, it is hard to imagine senior members of Congress knowing about blogs or Wikipedia, the one thing these guys care about is their public image. Many of them hire staff to track how they are represented in the media, and I imagine that has been extended to the Web.

And funny enough the recent article I read (in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung") had plenty of examples of Republicans manipulating Democrats' entries, too... I guess USA Today just sees what's convenient with its own position?