December 7, 2005
Wikipedia under fire
We’ve all seen poorly-written, somewhat-incorrect, or just downright wrong Wikipedia articles but few have done anything this drastic about it. Regardless, if I was John Seigenthaler Sr., I’d be pissed if I saw this:
“John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960’s. 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.”
Seigenthaler’s response began:
This is a highly personal story about Internet character assassination. It could be your story.
Some Wikipedia fans were mildly amused and argued “If he doesn’t like it, just change it!” What if it was an article about you? With the internet coming up in court many times and even providing evidence to sway the trial one way or another, who’s to say that something written on Wikipedia wouldn’t be further investigated, even if it was just a rumour. Imagine someone calling in an anonymous bomb warning to a school. Like the Anonymous Editor of Wikipedia, they cannot be prosecuted but imagine how the school would react. Would they take it seriously? If someone wrote allegations in a Wikipedia article and the police happened to find them, don’t you think they’d investigate, just on the off-chance that they might turn out to be true?
The “truth” of an encyclopedia like Wikipedia is commonly called into question. One could argue that no encyclopedia anywhere in the history of history has been completely accurate and they might be right. Using such an argument to claim that Wikipedia would naturally be “more correct” than these encyclopedias, however, is somewhat ridiculous. This claim would most likely be attributed to Wikipedia’s large number of daily visitors and that these visitors will fix something if it’s wrong. Wikipedia used to be a tool of the “internet elite” and with it’s proliferation in online dictionaries, reference materials, and even mainstream news articles, it will attract more and more visitors who don’t really care about its success. I believe that the additional visitors will do more harm than good. Maybe not even on purpose because, as you should always keep in mind, people are dumb.
As an impromptu experiment performed by me right now, I looked for an error, just one, to weakly demonstrate my claim. I’ll take an innocuous, but not random, article like the one about Western Michigan University. As I set off on my search, I first looked through the history to see if there had been any obvious vandalism (not as an end to my search, mind you, just for fun). I didn’t see anything right away but about midway through last month, I noticed that there had been a spelling edit. Something was strange about the spelling edit, though. The editor seemed to know what they were doing but they had neglected to correct a word mere letters away from the bulk of the edits. Surely, I thought, they must have later gone back to correct this. But when I checked the current article, it was still there! Success! The error had been active for about 1 month and a total of 12 edits. So 12 people who took the time to edit the article didn’t notice that “Engineering” was spelled “Enginnering” and I, taking a few seconds out of my Wednesday, suddenly become a hero.
What can be done about openly-editable content on the internet? Would more restrictions help such content or condemn it to be full of even more innacuracies? Wikipedia responded to the Seigenthaler incident with a new rule that you must be a registered user to create a new article. This is a far cry from making a difference, though, and it wouldn’t even have stopped what happened. More realistically, I think all anonymous edits should go into a “pending” queue where they await the approval of a Wikipedian who then takes responsibility for the added content. If they feel it’s appropriate, they add it. If they know it’s vandalism, they delete it, and if they’re not sure, they let it sit for someone else to look at. Old anonymous edits (whatever their status) would then be added to the history of the page to make sure valid information was not disappearing into the internet abyss.
Seigenthaler was justified in his posting to the world and I support him for taking a stand and pointing out that we shouldn’t trust this kind of technology as much as we do.
The bottom line: Will things change? Probably not.
