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Wikipedia Hoax Author Confesses
cmholm writes "As reported in The Seattle Times, Nashville resident Brian Chase has publically admitted that he edited a Wikipedia entry for John Seigenthaler, making appear that Mr. Seigenthaler was involved in the assassination of JFK. Mr. Chase fessed up after a cyber-sleuth tracked down the business from which he had posted to Wikipedia."
Has Wikipedia been a solid information resource? It shouldn't be taken THAT seriously...
Maybe not illegal, but, could lead to a civil tort at the very least.
Here's his wiki entry.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The guy did a whois on the IP address and he's made to sound like a regular Sherlock Holmes.
12:50 - press return.
Seigenthaler, founder of the First Amendment Center, said that as a longtime advocate of free speech, he found it awkward to be tracking down someone who had exercised that right. "I still believe in free expression," he said. "What I want is accountability."
Indeed.
The problem is that many people believe that actions - including speech - shouldn't have consequences.
They really need to go after that guy who started that story about the guy who wakes up in a tub of ice without kidneys. That was too creepy. And that Kilroy guy has lied out his ass millions of times. Where exactly is "here?" No one seems to know. Let's hang him.
In a shocking discovery, it appears that the Wikipedia entry came from the sixth floor of the Dallas book repository.
gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/About a year ago, I posted a discussion to some part of Wikipedia advocating digitally signing articles with GPG keys.
The plan was that each author, editor, and reader signs off for or against part or the whole of an article. The fallout should be that some articles get nearly universal positive sign offs, some get nearly universal against votes, and some are recorded as controversial. With GPG keys, we can also start ranking authors and editors -- are they generally agreed with, are they controversial, are they trolls. This is a codification of the skepticism that proponents of Wikipedia claim that any internet user should employ.
Something else I thought would be good would be to have branching articles. For instance, the entry for Hitler would have the main entry, which is the most agreed upon, a white-supremacist/neo-nazi version which stirs a lot of controversy, and maybe a David Icke version, which, while against Hitler, involves space reptiles and is therefore also controversial. Using the ranking and reputation system, a casual user can see how agreeable or controversial an article is.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I know, because I was a reporter, then later an editor. With tightening margins, reporters get paid less and less (try $20 for a story), and staff is shrunk in the dead-tree press. It's hard to keep the passion up when Ramen is for dinner, again. Sometimes, though, the made up news is more interesting or entertaining than the 'real' news.
Alaska's wildfires might be helping melt glaciers and sea ice
What tool did he use to trace the IP back to the delivery company?
ARIN Whois only goes as far as Bellsouth for the IP address in question (65.81.97.208), as does pretty much every utility, geographic and otherwise, that I could find in a rudimentary search.
So, what tool did he use to actually narrow it down to a specific business?
Actually, since its written and not spoken the word would be 'libel'
Actually, it might be considered libelous
I've got to love a post where someone says to look up "slander", and they never actually looked up "slander".
You crack me up, dude.
Slander
1 : the utterance of false charges or misrepresentations which defame and damage another's reputation
2 : a false and defamatory oral statement about a person -- compare libel
-slan£der£ous \-d(-)rs\ adjective
-slan£der£ous£ly adverb
-slan£der£ous£ness noun
(from Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary)
Perhaps you meant libel?
Again from Merriams...
Main Entry: 1li£bel
Pronunciation: l-bl
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, written declaration, from Middle French, from Latin libellus, diminutive of liber book
Date: 14th century
Libel
1 a : a written statement in which a plaintiff in certain courts sets forth the cause of action or the relief sought b archaic : a handbill especially attacking or defaming someone
2 a : a written or oral defamatory statement or representation that conveys an unjustly unfavorable impression b(1) : a statement or representation published without just cause and tending to expose another to public contempt (2) : defamation of a person by written or representational means (3) : the publication of blasphemous, treasonable, seditious, or obscene writings or pictures (4) : the act, tort, or crime of publishing such a libel
If Mr. Chase had spent the 30 seconds or required to create a Wikipedia account (valid email address not required!) he would have stopped the "cyber-sleuth" (hah) in his tracks. Wikipedia seems to laboring under the apprehension that IP addresses are somehow anonymous, whereas they provide far more information to third parties than an account name does (unless the poster is savvy enough to use a reasonably anonymous proxy not blocked by Wikipedia).
All from my car while waiting at the local MacDonalds drive-thru.
How exactly is anyone going to hold me accountable for what I say online?
We've recently issued free personal printing presses and the potential for efficient, unlimited redistribution to the population of the entire world. We may need to reevaluate a few things about how we treat information.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Communications Decency Act of 1996, in section 230 part C paragraph 1:
"TREATMENT OF PUBLISHER OR SPEAKER. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. "
Basically the act said the authors or the ISP (Wikipedia or Wikipedia's ISP) are not liable for any libel information which may be posted since they are not actual publishers or speakers in per se.
So to answer your question, it is not illegal to post libel information on the internet.
In this respect Wikipedia is actually far more effient than any search engine, because ALL links will point to pages with information on the subject - filtering between 'good' and 'bad' webpages is quite straight forward. This approach will also give you a layer of redundancy which is required when doing good research on any topic.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
I wonder if anonymity is just a passing phase for the Internet? A way to envision having a real network identity could the upbeat notion of a Citizen's card that allows you to participate virtually within the boundaries of accepted behavior. With wise regulation there's nothing bad about that.
But outside of that ideal in the real world we can hardly agree on what even constitutes human rights internationally. So there does seem to be a need for some forms of anonymity like when something is leaked because it's in the public interest. Although, for libel and slander accountability would seem to be better overall. Pragmatically, something that satisfies both could be logged access that requires a warrant to associate id with identity.
Shh.
There are two reasons to use GPG technology:
1. It's harder to steal someone's GPG identity.
2. You're not putting all your eggs in one basket like you do with logins. If wikipedia had a catastrophic server failure, they might lose all the authentication data. Goodbye wikipedia community. With GPG keys, there isn't such a large risk.
Here's a feature you may be overlooking: GPG keys are *universal* username/password credentials. Any bulliten board system could use GPG signed messages. That would do away with everybody re-inventing this authentication system and site security.
I would argue that GPG authentication is actually simpler than a username/password over HTTP security system. If that's the case, how can you call it overengineering, especially if any other bulliten board can drop their lousy HTTP authentication mechanism and use this one? That reduces complexity for site admins all over the world.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
While I agree that, on the surface, this seems like it shouldn't be illegal, if this where beleived it could cost Mr. Seigenthaler career opportunities. And, though unlikely, potentially even legal problems.
My main dissapointment here, however, is that this will decrease the trust of the value of the information on Wikipedia. I have a few friends (these are geeks as well mind you) who don't trust Wikipedia because essentially, 'anyone can write there'. They beleive that there is not enough valid information there; Too much opinion. Of course my response is that even published encyclopedias can include bad information based on opinion. By giving a published encyclopedia no room for doubt we are opening ourselves up to beleif in error, just as we are by not using critical thought processes when reading a Wikipedia entry.
So back to my dissapointment. Stunts like this while both funny & stupid are also devaluing the otherwise fairly valuable content of Wikipedia.
-ME®
Wrong again.
It says that Wikipedia can't be held liable for the libel provided by one of the submitters. It does not provide protection for the person who authored the article.
Also, if you read the act itself, it's designed to control obscenity and pr0nography, libel is never mentioned in the act.
1) use TOR,
2) use I2P,
3) use an open/free Wifi area (without camera mind you), or
4) in the works of Lawerence Lessig (if any of you went to law school): "use a pay phone." (and yes this is possible if you have some old school gear and the patience to wait on the modem)
While allowing accountability (IP request w/o subpoenas) would catch the majority of people on the internet, allowing cases for libel, any truly subversive or "alternative" group would understand how to avoid detection. Misinformation will always be available, anonymity existed way before the Internet become a popular tool, and no matter how many hoops you add those who want to remain unknown will.\
In the end maybe I support the proposed legal change, because it would increase the popularity of tools like TOR and I2P.
Cheers,
TdC
And if you're blind, hearing the article read out by a screen reader?
Is a recording of a slander slander or libel?
Is a public reading of a libel libel or slander?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
So this guy made some amendments to an article to find out how easy it is to 'fool' wikipedians. There must be thousands that have done that already, mostly known as vandalism. Now this whole hoopla has drawn the attention of million more cowboys to wikipedia. Some of them want to verify themselves that they too can write in wikipedia. Most will be caugth as simple vandalism (most peaple are not very smart mischieving) but som ewill fall though the cracks unnoticed. That percentage might even be bigger that the extra articles this new readership write.
So readership increases, amout of articles increases, but and the signal/noise ratio decreases rapidly. Smarter people are more likely to notice this increase and will turn away from it. So in the end, Wikipedia will be read (&written) by more less intelligent people.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
it's designed to control obscenity and pr0nography
Isn't "any information" an unusual way to spell "obscenity and pornography"?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The guy did this as a prank, and then he left it there for months?? Either he's extremely forgetful, or he doesn't know when to end a prank, or this wasn't a prank at all and he's just covering his ass.
Now we know who wrote it. However, we'll probably never know whether anybody ever read it before Seigenthaler noticed it. If you look at the "what links here" page for the Seigenthaler article, it looks like 100% of the list is articles that are now linked to it because of the controversy. During the time between the perpetration of the hoax and Seigenthaler publicizing of it, it's quite possible that the article wasn't linked to from anywhere in WP, and nobody had ever read it besides Seigenthaler. After all, he's a pretty obscure person in the greater scheme of things. If Seigenthaler had wanted to sue for libel, it would have been tough, because there's no evidence anyone ever read it. If I go in the closet and whisper to myself, "Seigenthaler shot Kennedy," it doesn't exactly qualify as slander. If the hoaxer had wanted people to read the hoax, he could have linked to it from the Kennedy article, for example. But then guess what? -- people would have corrected the hoax.
Find free books.
pla;
You have a very strong position here and I wanted to let you know that I found your statements on freedom of speech very compelling. The responsibility for freedom of speech is indeed on the part of the audience, and not the orator. Each human being is a liar once; nobody is perfect. Our mission is not to be perfect; it's to handle and understand why we are NOT perfect. When we can achieve that level of understanding, we can become truly evolved and perhaps then we could be within reach of the lofty utopian goals discovered and idolized by our ancestors. The guy who pranked Wikipedia did it as a joke... but people found out who he was because in American society, slander is punishable regardless of the medium. The thing is -- there is no slander on Wikipedia because it's impossible to prove that it's a reliable source of information -- anyone can edit any article, so there must be a high level of speculation on any post.
The purpose of Wikipedia is to have a launch pad for information... not actually keep it locked down as factual. Think something? Post it. Someone will either edit it or not. If they find something they want to add, let them. The end product is a plethora of great info that should be double-checked before it's used for anything imporant. Fact checking is required when citing Wikipedia in any kind of formal essay. It's a great place to START an essay, but it's a lousy reference. Therefore even if Seigenthaler wanted to sue Chase (and Seig] has announced he does *not* want to do so because Seig] believes in freedom of speech), Seig] couldn't win.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The CDA provides an ISP a limited "common carrier" defense against state and federal criminal prosecution for harassment, distribution of pornography to minors, etc. It does not protect the original publisher of the libel.
There is a chronology of how it was traced at the bottom of this page.
I am no genius. There was one chance in 10,000 that there would be a server on that IP address, and that it would be up when I tried it on impulse (it timed out during nightime hours during all of last week).
Mr. Seigenthaler is very gracious in complimenting me, but I am no genius. Anyone who knows the difference between an IP address and a hot-dog with mustard could have done the same thing. That includes dozens, or maybe hundreds, of Wikipedians. But they didn't bother now, did they?
It was a pleasure to work with Mr. Seigenthaler on this trace. He is an amazing, accomplished person, and I have a huge amount of respect for him. Before his Wikipedia story came out, I wasn't aware of him.
He's the genius, although it is true that I know more about Internet infrastructure than he does. But I know nothing that would impress all the clever Slashdotters reading this, I'm sure.
A new version takes years to come out and will have a lot of peer review and can be reviewed just once by the rest of the world and then either accepted or rejected. You do not have to keep a constant watch to check if some crackpot is not scribbling new entries in your encyclopedia and if they are you send your kid to bed without diner.
Then again all the safety measures also tend to enforce a certain accepted thinking approach with no room for the more wild theories and ideas. I wonder if a wikipedia article in centuries past on the arrangeent of the heavenly bodies would have been a problem.
After all I seem to conclude that the holocaust is real but how do I know? Only because that is what I have been told. Just like people were once told that the sun circled the earth. For both of wich I got no absolute proof. I don't even have proof WW2 really happened. Oh sure yeah there is a very big war cemetry were I grew up but who says they are real graves?
That is the problem with the "true" version of an event not directly experienced by you. You got to take somebody's word for it and somehow I am not that willing to take the word of someone unwilling to show his/hers full credentials. Wikipedia is usefull but only for totally non-discussable things like say looking up what that the name NASA is an acronym (forgot the word a while ago).
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"IP Protocol"? WTF? (hint: what does the "IP" in TCP/IP stand for?)
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
To answer all of your questions, those would be "libel".
Clearly, not all Slashdotters are as hypocritical as you make them out to be. Many moderators are willing to give pro-Microsoft, anti-stuffpopularonslashdot ideas mod points, as long as they are interesting and well thought out. It just so happens that, because certain ideas are more popular, that 1) Linux, etc are praised more often and modded up, and 2) The frequency of high-quality posts on Linux, etc. is higher than with the others.
And THEN you have the asshole moderators. That the GP got modded up is proof that there are conscientious mods who counter-modded the idiot who modded it down.
So please stop accusing the mass of Slashdotters of hypocrisy. You're treating a crowd as an individual and criticising its aggregate of viewpoints. If that isn't hypocritical, I don't know what is.
So, a "reliable" publisher is one that controls its writers to a degree with positive or negative consequences.
I think, therefore I doh.
Here's my take:
He did it as a joke. He thought it was inconsequential. He wasn't trying to construct some elaborate consipiracy to implicate the other guy for the assassination. He was basically doing the equivalent of changing the screensaver on computers at Best Buy to say "SpideyCT is cool". It is funny to be able to do something so simple, and because it reaches such a large audience, looks like you did something special.
So yeah, he could have covered his tracks better, but I bet it never occurred to him to try. Why would it? In fact, if he had tried to cover it up more, it would have looked like he was trying to cover it up, suggesting that he thought he was doing something he could get in trouble for.
If you're serious about looking something up, Wikipedia is an excellent starting point. That's all.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Hi, writer of History of Alaska on Wikipedia here, User: Toothpaste. Daniel Brandt wasn't banned for Wikipedia Watch, which he had created a few days before he was banned, if I recall correctly. Wikipedia had an article on him because he was notable for Google Watch and Wikipedia Watch, perhaps slightly more so today, due to a bit more media attention from all this. Brandt had tried to edit out parts of his article that were true and sourced, but that he did not like, and repeatedly tried to hold a vote for the article to be deleted, and started to do so under a false username after the first one had been banned. Predictably, Brian Chase was one of those people, that upon discovering Wikipedia, think, "I'll just replace 'Jesus' with 'vagina' and see how long that lasts, because that's how I get my shits and giggles." This, of course, constitutes most of all Wikipedian vandalism, with the rest being people that think Wikipedia is for spamming their GIF-laden Geocities website. Of the two types of these "experiments" I have seen, with the former being replacing George Bush's picture with a clown. The latter is subtly changing things around, so that Bush's article says "In the years of 1987 to 1989, George Bush worked mostly as an investor in the Texaco company," when he did not. I find the latter more annoying as a vandalism reverter. I hope this incident scares vandals into knowing they could be held accountable, as it's only a matter of time before someone actually does try to sue. However, what constitutes this libel Siegenthaler is sueing for? What makes this sneaky vandalism more annoying than earlier examples? Because it could be more easily mistaken for truth, is all, but I'm sure that would not hold up. I am most shocked that within all this, this Daniel Brandt has media attention due to tracking down the IP address, and the media, the Seattle Times for goodness's sake is not getting it right at all, which says something about the creditbility of non-Wikipedia sources, too.
The problem is that many people believe that actions - including speech - shouldn't have consequences.
Freedom of speech, by necessity, includes freedom after speech. In the real world, that usually requires anonymity.
Let's see what happens with that claim if applied to other rights:
"Freedom of religion, by necessity, includes freedom after sacrificing a captured non-believer. In the real world, that usually requires anonymity."
"Freedom of the press, by necessity, includes freedom after deliberatiely publishing libelous stories that destroy a victim's livelyhood, family, and personal relations. In the real world, that usually requires anonymity."
"The right to keep and bear arms, by necessity, includes freedom after fatally shooting unamred victims in the back. In the real world, that usually requires anonymity."
"Freedom of association, by necessity, includes freedom after creating a criminal gang and leading in an ongoing pattern of criminal activity, including murders, robberies, and extortion. In the real world, that usually requires anonymity."
And so on.
Sorry, the only true part of your claim is that: "In the real world, that usually requires anonymity."
Freedom of speech says the government can't make a law blocking you from speeking. It does not mean it can't make it a crime to deliberately or negligently cause harm others using false claims (that you KNOW to be false) as the instrument.
If, instead, the relevant Wiki article had included concrete evidence that Bush and Blair lied to the world for the purpose of controlling the world Mango market, or a leaked internal memo showing the Diebold CEO deliberately made defective machines that gave extra votes to Libertarians - Would we still consider it an "abuse" of free speech, or exactly the reason we need free speech?
IANAL, but as I understand it:
- Truth is an absolute defense against claims of libel.
- The standard to prove libel is higher for "public persons", such as celebrities (who voluntarily chose to make their living from their noteriety) or politicians, than for ordinary citizens. (In particular (if I have this right), negligence is no longer an issue and the plantif must show malace and/or deliberate falsehood.)
- The standards are essentially insurmountable when discussing elected officials or political issues. (Thus pundits, and political opponents, can take cheap shots, repeat outrageous and provable lies for years, or accuse their opponents of their own (but not their opponents) sins, in complete immunity. The effectively only need to answer to the "court of public opinion", not to a court of law.)
Yes, with free speech comes a certain degree of responsibility... On the part of the AUDIENCE. Charlatans and outright liers will always exist, and would even if we didn't have a 1st amendment in the US. Anyone who accepts a single Wiki entry as "proof" of ANYTHING deserves the ridicule they get when more skeptical readers point out the real facts.
The same can be said of the news media, commercial encyclopedias, printed books, scholarly journals, and every human being whose opinions and stories you pay attention to. Different institutions and different individuals deserve different levels of trust. Even the SAME individual or institution deserves different levels of trust on different subjects (or even at different times in their lifetime or history).
If you have a medical question, do you trust your doctor, your lawyer, the head of your IT department, or your auto mechanic when their opinions diverge? If you have a question regarding risk-benefit ratio of gun ownership, do you trust articles in a medical or a criminology journal when THEY diverge? And so on.
But that in no way absoves the author or speaker of THEIR responsibility - especially when they deliberatly construct and publish falsehoods that harm some particular victim.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
More dangerous are those who deliberately (or unknowlingly) slant the coverage of contentious subjects in one direction. My own experience was with Wiki editors (or whatever they are called) whose standard of proof for one side was dramatically higher than their standard of proof for another side.
That's called bias, and Wikipedia, at least in some areas, reflects certain biases rather badly.
However, as someone else pointed out, it shouldn't be anyone's final source of truth, but rather a starting point. It has good references (although in the changes I submitted, not only were they thrown out but so was my reference - as non-existent - even though a second's Google would have proved the existence of the reference as it was on sale at Amazon).
Wikipedia is a great experiment and a great resource. It's biggest danger is that people take it as the final answer. But then, far too many people take the main stream media as the final answer also, which is why they have so much power.
The only good weather is bad weather.
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Deceptive and disparaging odors?!
So let me see if I have this straight.
Say I were to fart a long drawn out one that sounded through some total fluke like "Leiterfluid kicks puppies and hates kittens", you could sue me?!?
Gotta go buy Beano stock.
I think the GGP was largely correct, and Judith Miller is an excellent example. There are some exceptions, Fox springs to mind, but generally journalists should be aware that being caught in a lie or in deliberate bias (in Miller's case, this is what's hanged her. I have no doubt if she'd gone to jail to protect a source and not been seen as a partisan hack she'd have been defended by her collegues, not shunned) is a surefire route to losing your job.
Judith Miller is just about the worst example you could pick to discredit the argument of the GGP.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Wikipedia routinely blocks open proxies, and recently they've began blocking anyone using Tor onion routing. Evil doers can, however, edit Wikipedia with impunity from the largest proxy in the world, America Online; Wikipedia admins are not allowed to block an AOL IP address any longer than 15 minutes, to prevent "collateral damage".