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John Seigenthaler Sr. Criticises Wikipedia
EsonLinji writes "John Seigenthaler Sr, a former assistant to Robert Kennedy, has written a commentary in USA Today expressing outrage at a libelous biography that appeared on Wikipedia that suggested he was involved with the assasination of JFK and spent more than a decade in Russia. His commentary also takes aim at internet providers and the laws that allow them to act as common carriers without liability for the actions of their users."
no link to the article?
If you disagree with it, just edit it! No need to get all indignant.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
His commentary also takes aim at internet providers and the laws that allow them to act as common carriers without liability for the actions of their users
:)
Since when do political assassins give lessons about liabilities for one's actions?
According to Wikipedia he was involved in the assassination of a President and an Attorney General.
John.
Alcohol and Calculus don't mix. Don't drink and derive.
that everything's connected.
If the ISPs were deemed to not be classed as common carriers, and liable for every action of their users, the restrictions on people signing up to ISPs would be unworkable (if the ISP was to remain viable).
Also, they could then be liable for actions of businesses against businesses.
This would set up being as ISP as a very dangerous business. So much so, that it would likely stifle network activity.
If that's stifled, then businesses don't communicate as effectively.
Nor do people.
Which would seriously limit the participation and movement of his discussion and debate forums mentioned in his proper biography.
So, by getting his own way, he'd eventually end up shooting himself in the foot..
How foresighted.
There's some irony for you.
The ability for idiots to troll on Wikipedia is simply part of its nature, and (unless fundamentally changed) means that it can never be viewed as an objective, neutral, authoritative, comprehensive, or in any way lasting resource. The people to complain about are the users who so readily link to Wikipedia to settle every argument or copy-and-paste to pass every writing assignment. They give it a artificial air of credibility, and they take it into their lives without any sense of context.
There are probably plenty of blogs and tinfoil-lined web sites that do his reputation much worse than the entry in question, but he doesn't really need to worry about those because they are obscure. Wikipedia has become an intellectual crutch for millions of lazy visitors, and thus something of an institution. It smells authoritative and is treated that way by too many people. The only cure is for smart people who know better to cite better, direct information and to let Wikipedia play the role that its entire structure demands that it play: one big idealogical squabble-fest.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
This seems like another example of someone who completely doesn't understand the internet. Sure, he had an erroneous (libelous?) biography published on Wikipedia. Fucking change it. That is the entire point of Wikipedia, as others have already pointed out. And Wikipedia IS a wonderful - yes, AND flawed - research tool. Nobody says cite Wikipedia in your dissertation and be done with it. It's a starting point, as any Encyclopedia should be, and it's made pretty clear that anyone CAN edit the damn thing. So you take it with a grain of salt, and corroborate your information elsewhere.
Instead, this guy does the going-over-peoples'-heads thing, pulls strings here and there to get things removed from websites, and considers going after an ISP because that evil intarnet needs to be controlled. It's like wanting to know who scrawled naughty messages about you on the blackboard before you walked into class in 3rd grade, when the fucking eraser is in front of your eyes and you're failing to use it.
I was hoping to see something redemptive about the article, but honestly, all I saw was whining. Unfortunately, whining of the dangerous kind, because it comes from a guy who has lots of strings to pull, and who is completely out of touch with the world he lives in. My $0.02.
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supposedly a reliable encyclopedia
Supposed by whom? Wikipedia is at best a starting point for information on anything of any importance. Fortunately most articles tend to cite their references, so you can go and check on facts relatively easily.
I do also notice that Wikipedia has a lot of entries for stuff that might not otherwise be considered important enough to be in an encyclopedia
Why is that a problem?
Isn't it a bit ironic that Wikipedia (supposedly a reliable encyclopedia) has less advanced moderation than Slashdot (famously unreliable)? Perhaps it's time they got a bit more structure.
... That includes obscure topics like video games that you might not care about.
Actually, a new feature called article validation is about to go live on wikipedia. See the article from this week's signpost. The feature will hopefully help adress some of the issues being raised in this story.
I do also notice that Wikipedia has a lot of entries for stuff that might not otherwise be considered important enough to be in an encyclopedia - open source software that is not yet out of beta, cars in video games etc.
Yeah, so? Jimmy Wales:"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."
While I sympathise with his outrage, you would think that a man who takes such pride in founding the "Freedom Forum First Amendment Center" might be a little slower to try to bring his legal people to bear on this issue. Might the original article have been merely misinformed rather than malicious?
His right to publish a rebuttal in the op-ed section is safe, but then he (apparently) has money.
Freedom is slippery.
Using plain ol' text since 1968
I knew someone was going to say that.
No. My local newspaper purports to be accurate and non-libelous. Wikipedia does not. The difference (almost) is between something in a newspaper, and something scribbled on a bathroom wall.
Meanwhile, you have the right to commit libel, as I have the right to sue you for it, if I can prove that you said it. Seigenthaler has the same option. What he is advocating is prior restraint.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
"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."
My personal interpretation of the above quote is that "someone at some point suspected he was involved".
If someone says "man, that backslashdot guy was thought to be an idiot by some people". Sure this obvious and clear falsehood wreaks of deliberate libel, but I'm not going to run around having a hissy fit and sue unless someone were to say "that backslashdot guy, he's an idiot cause I saw him say something stupid".
What happened to the first amendment? Is anyone allowed to say?
It's true that obvious vandalism, pranks, etc. get reverted quickly. It's also true that controversial material, particularly on reasonably current topics (e.g Post-invasion Iraq get attention by editors who are actually checking facts and looking for sources.
But plausible or accidental misinformation, especially if well-written, can remain in Wikipedia unchallenged for very long periods of time. Spelling errors will be corrected, sentences rewritten, but facts don't get checked in any systematic way. Two that I personally ran across:
Example number 1: From July 2003 until October 2003 the article on Jack London said that he "attended the University of California" (true) where he was the editor of the university's literary journal (not true). When I asked the editor who inserted it for his source, he replied "it was the story that was spread around at Cal when I was going there. I don't know if it's true or not, but I had no reason to doubt it at the time that I wrote the info."
Example number 2: Wikipedia policy is act immediately to remove "copyvios"--any material copied from a source that does not explicit provide a free license or is not demonstrably in the public domain. Nevertheless, from June 2004 until a couple of days ago, most of the material in Wikipedia's article on Khalil Gibran was a direct copy from a Cornell University website. Nobody happened to notice it.
These are examples I happened to catch, so I'm proud of them. But there are also two embarrassing examples. There are at least two examples I know of misinformation I personally inserted into Wikipedia. One was carelessness. The other, far worse, was a case where I inserted casual personal "knowledge" that I believed to be true but didn't check--just like the other editor who thought Jack London had edited the Berkeley literary journal. Both went uncorrected for over a year.
The large number of facts that are corrected blinds Wikipedians to the existence of many that are not. Fact-checking is haphazard and catch-as-catch-can. It all works surprisingly well, but "working surprisingly well" is not the same as "working."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
A wiki runs somewhere. Someone comes along and enters something illegal: how to be a sniper, slander or liber about a certain person, excerpts from a book against copyright, you name it.
Someone else comes along, see this and is outraged. They want to do something. What can they do?
"Change it yourself" is like saying "if skinheads painted Nazi slogans on your house wall, just repaint it". Is that really OK and is all that should be done? Nobody should be pursued for this?
Are we saying that a wiki is somehow above the laws and should be exonerated by default of any consequences, along with its administrators, host and everybody, except perhaps that malicious contributor who can't be tracked down anyway?
Personally, I'm glad the dude raised his voice about this. The terms of use and so called "licenses" that wiki's generally use are simple jokes. You can't put up a system where anybody can enter anything they want, in high exposure, and expect to get away with it when something illegal is inserted. Why? Because a wiki is not a discussion. It's supposed to be reference.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
Internet forums are not like newspapers of old. There isn't an editor or a publisher who stands behind data being presented. It's raw vox populi in all its glory and ugliness. It's natural that falsehood and libel make their way into something like the Wikipedia, because any spiteful and unscrupulous person can, for some time, carry out a program of defamation.
...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. Congress has enabled them and protects them.
Naturally, anything of this nature that you read of the Wikipedia must be treated with extreme suspicion. That's a good habit to get into anyway, because it turns out the conventional media isn't necessarily better. They can do character assasination under the guise of innuendo and formulae carefully crafted to keep them out of legal trouble. Just think of the signature Fox technique for this. If they wanted out to get Mr. Seigenthaler, they'd simply keep saying as they go to commercial break, "Coming up, was John Seigenthaler part of a Kennedy assasination conspiracy?" They don't have to do anything; maybe they'll have a lame and completely unmemorable two minute discussion. The important thing is that they've drummed the following the following phrase into the public consciousness "Kennedy assasniation conspiracy", then associated his name with it.
I think an important thing to learn from the Wikipedia is the degree to which people should or should not be trusted. Clearly this incident shows how one should approach information in the Wikipedia with caution. However, to pick one or two incidents and use it as a representative of the whole is foolish indeed. It misses more than 50% of the data. Consider the following statement by Mr. Seigenthaler:
He says this as if it is other than it should be.
The same kind of arguments about the depredations of wicked individuals have been made in favor of censorship of the press and in favor of aristocratic rule. If people are allowed to print what they want, some of them will print libel and heresy. If people are allowed to rule, then the vote low minded persons will count as much as virtuous people. The problem with this train of thought is that it misses so much. It misses the shortcomings of the alternatives: the possibility that it might be the censors who have a libelous agenda, or the possibility that the aristocrats are the bigoted and low minded persons.
It also dismisses out of hand that virtue and decency may be more common in the general population than proponents of elitism will have you believe.
I am by nature a cynic about human nature, but if you need a counter example showing the preponderance of decency in the general population, I can think of no greater one than the Wikipedia. We all know the spiteful have less to do and thus more time to pursue their work than the fair minded. It takes ten, possibly a hundred or more decent people to balance one nasty one with an agenda. Given this, you would expect the Wikipedia, given its rules of governance, to be an utter cesspool. But it's not. Quite the contrary, it is nearly always very balanced, at least in articles with many people are watching. Clearly in the case of obscure figures such as Seigenthaler, there are few people watching. About the only thing it is safe to take from such an article is that he was somehow associated with the Kennedys.
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."
Then how much worse to spread an evil opinion about people in general?
The lesson of democracy and free speech is that there is always somebody somewhere who is breaking open the pillow and spreading the feathers around, and it's futile to try prevent it. But is possible to get them all, or mostly back. You just need lots of help.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That's what Wikipedia says about him, anyway.
I was going to point out the role that anonymous pamphleteers played in kindling the American Revolutionary War, which I think we're safe in assuming John Seigenthaler Sr still recognizes as a good thing. But in researching references, I found someone who had already articulated this argument better than I could hope to:
(Full article by Ken Anderson, Editor of the Magic City Morning Star, is here; it points out how many of the founding fathers 'posted anonymously')
It's too bad John Seigenthaler Sr. has his feelings hurt by what is an obviously untrue story about him. I'm a little suprised that someone with what appears to be both polititcs and journalism in his background is so easily perturbed such ludicrous accusations; both professions generally involve thicker skins than that. he's welcome to his opinion about the wisdom of allowing anonymity - but fortunately (in my opinion!), reality differs.
The ability for idiots to troll on Wikipedia is simply part of its nature, and (unless fundamentally changed) means that it can never be viewed as an objective, neutral, authoritative, comprehensive, or in any way lasting resource.
This is a natural conclusion, but it's simply wrong. This is like arguing that the U.S. Capitol is not a lasting resource because parts of the roof and many of the interior walls have had to be replaced over the past fifty years. Or that the writings of Plato are not a lasting resource because their original media crumbled to dust centuries ago. Or that the Bible is not a lasting resource because it has been reorganized, rewritten, retranslated, and augmented over the course of dozens of centuries.
Knowledge does not last unless you maintain it. Erosion tries to break it; idiots try to deface it, censor it, ridicule it, or drown it out. And, of course, knowledge eventually goes out of date -- some of the attacks on it eventually prove to be legitimate, and the knowledge evolves to suit. Honest scholars must do work, hard work, throughout their lives, in order to preserve the old knowledge and keep it up to date. This has always been true; Wikipedia just makes the process much more evident by speeding it up several hundred times.
Wikipedia is accurate to the extent that people maintain it. The articles that people watch are very accurate indeed. The entries that nobody reads or cares about -- including Siegenthaler's biography -- are not. If Siegenthaler wants an accurate biography of himself to appear on Wikipedia, he should write one and put it up, or have someone else do so. If he wants to be sure that trolls don't deface it, he has to monitor all the changes and revert it to a previous version whenever it gets defaced. (Which will probably be a lot more often, now that he's turned himself into a poster boy for the thin-skinned.)
Does he think that this work should be someone else's responsibility? Too bad. TANSTAAFL. If you care about it, do the work. If you don't care, don't expect me to care, either.
The problem, which you identify, is that people think that the text which appears on Wikipedia at any given moment is authoritative. But that's only a symptom of a bigger problem: there is no authoritative source of information. A "squabble-fest" is all we have. The good thing about Wikipedia is that intellectual squabbles take place online, in front of your eyes, in real time -- instead of being spread out across dozens of books, articles, and isolated websites, published over years or even centuries, each of which is a hodgepodge of accurate and inaccurate information.
Wikipedia has potential and is "entertaining" but I'd never use it for real research.
Uh...that's, like, okay.
Because Wikipedia links directly to original sources.
The reason that it was so crucial for old-media encyclopedias to be so heavily examined is because it was a pain in the ass to check original sources.
Most things that people hear word-of-mouth or in the newspaper are less well-checked than what I read on Wikipedia. And that's what I and 99% of the people out there use Wikipedia for. We aren't trying to use it as an authoritative source for writing a doctoral thesis, where the propagation of even a single error might be significant. We're trying to get real-world usable information. And Wikipedia does a better job than anything else out there of doing this.
A lot of people bash Wikipedia because it doesn't seem like it should work. It clashes mightily with the common computer security approach of accepting absolutely no attacks against something. Wikipedia, however, takes advantage of a completely different mechanism that most people undervalue -- recoverability. *Anyone* can vandalize Wikipedia. Vandalizing Wikipedia en-masse, however, is totally useless, because the bulk of Wikipedia's content *is* useful and *does* keep improving.
If someone thinks that Wikipedia is bad, fine. Let them *branch* Wikipedia into a "stable branch", and they can only allow fully reviewed changes to be added, or whatever. That's absolutely legal. There's at least some argument that maybe Wikipedia only needed to be wild and loose in its early days. I don't really think that it's likely, but instead of bitching about how Wikipedians are doing their volunteer work that they're giving to the world, sit down and fix it, you know?
Personally, I think that the rate of update and the value of more articles outweighs ideological arguments about review, but whatever.
Maybe at some point, there will be some concept of a gradient of article stability, and it will require more work to change an older article. [shrug] I dunno. But I hate all the nay-saying about WP.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
The fact that WikiPedia can be used in such a manner, terribly diminishes the worth of WikiPedia's articles.
Wikipedia's worth is simply determined by its usage, no more and no less. And apparently, enough people use it for Mr. Seigenthaler to worry about what is says about him.
How do you know an article that is based on fact vs. an article that is based on vindictiveness?
Whatever gave you the idea that everything you read is based on fact? Do you seriously believe that everything the Bush administration publishes is based on fact? That everything in the EB is based on fact? That everything in your textbooks is based on fact? That everything in the newspaper is based on fact? Do you make a habit out of believing accusations against people without evidence? How naive can you be?
The problem isn't with the Wikipedia. The Wikipedia is completely honest about what it is.
The problem is that people like Seigenthaler and you need to grow up yourself and stop nurturing the illusion that publication is some kind of quality control. Start using your head and start asking for evidence, for whatever claims you hear.
As for Mr. Seigenthaler and his little problem: the Wikipedia provides the means for him to correct those issues he feels inaccurate. If the original author is still around, they can hash it out on the discussion page. Maybe one side or the other will provide some evidence to support the accusation or the defense. That's all there's to it. But, as he told us, he isn't interested in correcting the information, he is interested in dragging the original author in front of a court, and I'm sorry, that kind of powerplay just doesn't work anymore in the 21st century.