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See update article below original article
Online Encyclopedia Tightens Editing Rules
'Wikipedia' Cracks Down After Journalist Complains of False Entry
By DAN GOODIN, AP
SAN FRANCISCO (Dec. 5) - Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, is tightening submission rules after a prominent journalist complained that an article falsely implicated him in the Kennedy assassinations.
Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site, said Monday. People who modify existing articles will still be able to do so without registering.
The change comes less than a week after John Seigenthaler, a one-time administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, complained in an op-ed published in USA Today that a biography of him on Wikipedia claimed he had been suspected in the assassinations of the former attorney general and his brother, President John F. Kennedy.
Wikipedia, often cited as a prime example of the type of collective knowledge-pooling that the Internet enables, has some 850,000 articles in English as well as entries in at least eight other languages, including Italian, French, German and Portuguese.
Since it's launch in 2001, it has grown into a storehouse of information on topics ranging from medieval art to nanotechnology.
The volume is possible because the site relies on volunteers, including many experts in their fields, who submit entries and edit previously submitted articles.
Wales said he hopes the registration requirement will limit the number of articles being created.
While it would not prevent people from posting false information, the new process will make it easier, said Wales, for the site's 600 active volunteers to review and remove factual errors, defaming statements and other material that runs afoul of Wikipedia policy.
Wikipedia visitors will still be able to edit content already posted without registering. It takes 15 to 20 seconds to create an account on the Web site, and an e-mail address is not required.
"What we're hopeful to see is that by slowing that down to 1,500 a day from several thousand, the people who are monitoring this will have more ability to improve the quality," Wales said Monday. "In many cases the types of things we see going on are impulse vandalism."
The episode demonstrates the lack of accountability that often comes with articles posted by anonymous people over the Internet. Unlike content included in magazines, books and other traditional media, online material can be submitted by just about anyone, often without having to volunteer any identifying information.
"I sympathize with this person, but it's really not any different than a posting on an anonymous Web page," Eugene Volokh, a law professor specializing in the First Amendment, said, referring to Seigenthaler. Volokh added that Wikipedia provides casual readers with a valuable service but that he would never rely on it as a source for scholarly articles.
Seigenthaler, USA Today's founding editorial director and a former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, said that after the op-ed was published Wikipedia's biography of him was changed to remove the false accusations.
But Seigenthaler said an entry on Monday still got some facts wrong, apparently because volunteers are confusing him with his son, a journalist with NBC News.
Also disturbing is a section of his biography that tracks changes made to the article, Seigenthaler said. Entries in that history section label him a "Nazi" and say other "really vicious, venomous, salacious homophobic things about me," he said.
Wales said those comments would be removed.
For 132 days, Seigenthaler said, the"biography of him falsely claimed that "for a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby."
The biography also falsely stated that he had lived in the Soviet Union from 1971 to 1984.
Seigenthaler said he wasn't convinced the new registration requirement would stop the practice of vandals posting content that is slanderous or knowingly incorrect.
Wikipedia will either have to fix the problem or will lose whatever credibility it still has, he said.
"The marketplace of ideas ultimately will take care of the problem," Seigenthaler said. "In the meantime, what happens to people like me?"
-------------------------------------
UPDATE
A Little Sleuthing Unmasks Writer of Wikipedia Prank
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: December 11, 2005
It started as a joke and ended up as a shot heard round the Internet, with the joker losing his job and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, suffering a blow to its credibility.
Skip to next paragraph
John Siegenthaler's op-ed article in USA Today
Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar A man in Nashville has admitted that, in trying to shock a colleague with a joke, he put false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville.
Brian Chase, 38, who until Friday was an operations manager at a small delivery company, told Mr. Seigenthaler on Friday that he had written the material suggesting that Mr. Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. Wikipedia, a nonprofit venture that is the world's biggest encyclopedia, is written and edited by thousands of volunteers.
Mr. Seigenthaler discovered the false entry only recently and wrote about it in an op-ed article in USA Today, saying he was especially annoyed that he could not track down the perpetrator because of Internet privacy laws. His plight touched off a debate about the reliability of information on Wikipedia - and by extension the entire Internet - and the difficulty in holding Web sites and their users accountable, even when someone is defamed.
In a confessional letter to Mr. Seigenthaler, Mr. Chase said he thought Wikipedia was a "gag" Web site and that he had written the assassination tale to shock a co-worker, who knew of the Seigenthaler family and its illustrious history in Nashville.
"It had the intended effect," Mr. Chase said of his prank in an interview. But Mr. Chase said that once he became aware last week through news accounts of the damage he had done to Mr. Seigenthaler, he was remorseful and also a little scared of what might happen to him.
Mr. Chase also found that he was slowly being cornered in cyberspace, thanks to the sleuthing efforts of Daniel Brandt, 57, of San Antonio, who makes his living as a book indexer. Mr. Brandt has been a frequent critic of Wikipedia and started an anti-Wikipedia Web site (www.wikipedia-watch.org) in September after reading what he said was a false entry about himself.
Using information in Mr. Seigenthaler's article and some online tools, Mr. Brandt traced the computer used to make the Wikipedia entry to the delivery company in Nashville. Mr. Brandt called the company and told employees there about the Wikipedia problem but was not able to learn anything definitive.
Mr. Brandt then sent an e-mail message to the company, asking for information about its courier services. A response bore the same Internet Protocol address that was left by the creator of the Wikipedia entry, offering further evidence of a connection.
A call by a New York Times reporter to the delivery company on Thursday made employees nervous, Mr. Chase later told Mr. Seigenthaler. On Friday, Mr. Chase hand-delivered a letter to Mr. Seigenthaler's office, confessing what he had done, and later they talked at length.
Mr. Chase told him that the Seigenthaler name had come up at work and that he had popped it into a search engine and was led to Wikipedia, where, he said, he was surprised that anyone could make an entry.
Mr. Chase wrote: "I am truly sorry to have offended you, sir. Whatever fame comes to me from this will be ill-gotten indeed."
Mr. Seigenthaler said Mr. Brandt was "a genius" for tracking down Mr. Chase. He said he "was not after a pound of flesh" and would not take Mr. Chase to court.
Mr. Chase resigned from his job because, he said, he did not want to cause problems for his company. Mr. Seigenthaler urged Mr. Chase's boss to rehire him, but Mr. Chase said that, so far, this had not happened.
Mr. Chase said that as Mr. Brandt and the news media were closing in and he realized how much he had hurt Mr. Seigenthaler, he decided that stepping forward was "the right thing to do."
Mr. 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."
Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, said that the site would make more information about users available to make it easier to lodge complaints. But he portrayed the error as something that fell through the cracks, not a sign of a systemic problem. "We have to continually evaluate whether our controls are enough," he said.
Online Encyclopedia Tightens Editing Rules
'Wikipedia' Cracks Down After Journalist Complains of False Entry
By DAN GOODIN, AP
SAN FRANCISCO (Dec. 5) - Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, is tightening submission rules after a prominent journalist complained that an article falsely implicated him in the Kennedy assassinations.
Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site, said Monday. People who modify existing articles will still be able to do so without registering.
The change comes less than a week after John Seigenthaler, a one-time administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, complained in an op-ed published in USA Today that a biography of him on Wikipedia claimed he had been suspected in the assassinations of the former attorney general and his brother, President John F. Kennedy.
Wikipedia, often cited as a prime example of the type of collective knowledge-pooling that the Internet enables, has some 850,000 articles in English as well as entries in at least eight other languages, including Italian, French, German and Portuguese.
Since it's launch in 2001, it has grown into a storehouse of information on topics ranging from medieval art to nanotechnology.
The volume is possible because the site relies on volunteers, including many experts in their fields, who submit entries and edit previously submitted articles.
Wales said he hopes the registration requirement will limit the number of articles being created.
While it would not prevent people from posting false information, the new process will make it easier, said Wales, for the site's 600 active volunteers to review and remove factual errors, defaming statements and other material that runs afoul of Wikipedia policy.
Wikipedia visitors will still be able to edit content already posted without registering. It takes 15 to 20 seconds to create an account on the Web site, and an e-mail address is not required.
"What we're hopeful to see is that by slowing that down to 1,500 a day from several thousand, the people who are monitoring this will have more ability to improve the quality," Wales said Monday. "In many cases the types of things we see going on are impulse vandalism."
The episode demonstrates the lack of accountability that often comes with articles posted by anonymous people over the Internet. Unlike content included in magazines, books and other traditional media, online material can be submitted by just about anyone, often without having to volunteer any identifying information.
"I sympathize with this person, but it's really not any different than a posting on an anonymous Web page," Eugene Volokh, a law professor specializing in the First Amendment, said, referring to Seigenthaler. Volokh added that Wikipedia provides casual readers with a valuable service but that he would never rely on it as a source for scholarly articles.
Seigenthaler, USA Today's founding editorial director and a former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, said that after the op-ed was published Wikipedia's biography of him was changed to remove the false accusations.
But Seigenthaler said an entry on Monday still got some facts wrong, apparently because volunteers are confusing him with his son, a journalist with NBC News.
Also disturbing is a section of his biography that tracks changes made to the article, Seigenthaler said. Entries in that history section label him a "Nazi" and say other "really vicious, venomous, salacious homophobic things about me," he said.
Wales said those comments would be removed.
For 132 days, Seigenthaler said, the"biography of him falsely claimed that "for a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby."
The biography also falsely stated that he had lived in the Soviet Union from 1971 to 1984.
Seigenthaler said he wasn't convinced the new registration requirement would stop the practice of vandals posting content that is slanderous or knowingly incorrect.
Wikipedia will either have to fix the problem or will lose whatever credibility it still has, he said.
"The marketplace of ideas ultimately will take care of the problem," Seigenthaler said. "In the meantime, what happens to people like me?"
-------------------------------------
UPDATE
A Little Sleuthing Unmasks Writer of Wikipedia Prank
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: December 11, 2005
It started as a joke and ended up as a shot heard round the Internet, with the joker losing his job and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, suffering a blow to its credibility.
Skip to next paragraph
John Siegenthaler's op-ed article in USA Today
Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar A man in Nashville has admitted that, in trying to shock a colleague with a joke, he put false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville.
Brian Chase, 38, who until Friday was an operations manager at a small delivery company, told Mr. Seigenthaler on Friday that he had written the material suggesting that Mr. Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. Wikipedia, a nonprofit venture that is the world's biggest encyclopedia, is written and edited by thousands of volunteers.
Mr. Seigenthaler discovered the false entry only recently and wrote about it in an op-ed article in USA Today, saying he was especially annoyed that he could not track down the perpetrator because of Internet privacy laws. His plight touched off a debate about the reliability of information on Wikipedia - and by extension the entire Internet - and the difficulty in holding Web sites and their users accountable, even when someone is defamed.
In a confessional letter to Mr. Seigenthaler, Mr. Chase said he thought Wikipedia was a "gag" Web site and that he had written the assassination tale to shock a co-worker, who knew of the Seigenthaler family and its illustrious history in Nashville.
"It had the intended effect," Mr. Chase said of his prank in an interview. But Mr. Chase said that once he became aware last week through news accounts of the damage he had done to Mr. Seigenthaler, he was remorseful and also a little scared of what might happen to him.
Mr. Chase also found that he was slowly being cornered in cyberspace, thanks to the sleuthing efforts of Daniel Brandt, 57, of San Antonio, who makes his living as a book indexer. Mr. Brandt has been a frequent critic of Wikipedia and started an anti-Wikipedia Web site (www.wikipedia-watch.org) in September after reading what he said was a false entry about himself.
Using information in Mr. Seigenthaler's article and some online tools, Mr. Brandt traced the computer used to make the Wikipedia entry to the delivery company in Nashville. Mr. Brandt called the company and told employees there about the Wikipedia problem but was not able to learn anything definitive.
Mr. Brandt then sent an e-mail message to the company, asking for information about its courier services. A response bore the same Internet Protocol address that was left by the creator of the Wikipedia entry, offering further evidence of a connection.
A call by a New York Times reporter to the delivery company on Thursday made employees nervous, Mr. Chase later told Mr. Seigenthaler. On Friday, Mr. Chase hand-delivered a letter to Mr. Seigenthaler's office, confessing what he had done, and later they talked at length.
Mr. Chase told him that the Seigenthaler name had come up at work and that he had popped it into a search engine and was led to Wikipedia, where, he said, he was surprised that anyone could make an entry.
Mr. Chase wrote: "I am truly sorry to have offended you, sir. Whatever fame comes to me from this will be ill-gotten indeed."
Mr. Seigenthaler said Mr. Brandt was "a genius" for tracking down Mr. Chase. He said he "was not after a pound of flesh" and would not take Mr. Chase to court.
Mr. Chase resigned from his job because, he said, he did not want to cause problems for his company. Mr. Seigenthaler urged Mr. Chase's boss to rehire him, but Mr. Chase said that, so far, this had not happened.
Mr. Chase said that as Mr. Brandt and the news media were closing in and he realized how much he had hurt Mr. Seigenthaler, he decided that stepping forward was "the right thing to do."
Mr. 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."
Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, said that the site would make more information about users available to make it easier to lodge complaints. But he portrayed the error as something that fell through the cracks, not a sign of a systemic problem. "We have to continually evaluate whether our controls are enough," he said.
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