Dangers of Wikipedia

Open forums may be open but are they responsible? My feeling is Wikipedia should be allowed to develop, grow and thrive and it's relative significance should be determined in a free media universe: if it does good things, it's users will grow, if it doesn't, it'll die on it's own. The lesson here is to not to accept anything from anyone, on faith. I mean, it's not like the so-called mainstream media isn't guilty of not just being misleading but, at times, outright bias.

The Danger of Wikipedia

By Jay DeFoore

NEW YORK Although many in and especially outside the online news industry have lauded the power of citizens' media and the self-correcting "wisdom of the crowd" ethos, little attention has been given to the very real dangers that come when people are allowed to post anything they want anonymously.

Writing an Op-Ed in Tuesday's USA Today, John Seigenthaler, a retired journalist who served as Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant in the early 1960s, says that a very personal experience has convinced him that "Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool."

Seigenthaler writes that a "biography" on the site posted by an anonymous author libeled him when it offered the following unsourced statement: "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."

As the founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, Seigenthaler is not known to be an advocate of restricting the right of free speech.

Seigenthaler describes first his shock, and then his so-far unsuccessful attempt to discover the identity of the original poster. Wikipedia was unable to identify the source, although he was able to discover the source's IP address, 65-81-97-208, and then trace it to a customer of BellSouth Internet.

Discouraged by the ISP's lack of personal attention to his request -- the first response was a form e-mail signed by the "Abuse Team" -- Seigenthaler then pursued satisfaction through legal means.

"My only remote chance of getting the name, I learned, was to file a 'John or Jane Doe' lawsuit against my 'biographer'" Seigenthaler writes. "Major communications Internet companies are bound by federal privacy laws that protect the identity of their customers, even those who defame online. Only if a lawsuit resulted in a court subpoena would BellSouth give up the name."

But legally, his options appear limited: "Federal law also protects online corporations -- BellSouth, AOL, MCI Wikipedia, etc. -- from libel lawsuits. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, specifically states that 'no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker.' That legalese means that, unlike print and broadcast companies, online service providers cannot be sued for disseminating defamatory attacks on citizens posted by others."

Seigenthaler disputes Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' assertion that the site's thousands of volunteer editors operate a quick self-correcting mechanism.

"My 'biography' was posted May 26. On May 29, one of Wales' volunteers 'edited' it only by correcting the misspelling of the word 'early,'" Seigenthaler writes. "For four months, Wikipedia depicted me as a suspected assassin before Wales erased it from his website's history Oct. 5."

Seigenthaler concludes with the following: "And so 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 protects and enables them."