"If your mother says she loves you, check it out" stands as one of the most treasured journalistic maxims, a reminder that no assertion, no matter how likely it seems, should be taken at face value.
Now, thanks to a volunteer online encyclopedia, we can add another: "If Wikipedia says John Seigenthaler plotted to kill the Kennedys, check it out."
Wikipedia, the free digital reference book that has grown enormously in size and stature this year, was dealt a public-relations setback recently when Seigenthaler, a prominent Nashville newspaper editor in the civil rights era, told of a bogus Wikipedia biographical entry on him that seemed to have been crafted by an aspiring Oliver Stone-style screenwriter.
Or it could have been Buck Owens or Billy Crudup. For a couple of weeks after Seigenthaler's USA Today article explaining the situation, we didn't know, because one of the treasured values in the Wikipedia community is anonymity, or the possibility of anonymity, and the author of the Seigenthaler entry had held onto his.
Earlier this month, though, after being nearly tracked down from his computer's Internet protocol address by a Wikipedia critic, confessing to Seigenthaler and then being exposed in The New York Times, the prankster was revealed as a Nashville man trying to tweak a member of a prominent city family to amuse a co-worker.
It shouldn't work like that.
Wikipedia, if it wants to achieve the "better-than-Britannica accuracy" that Jimmy Wales, who leads the effort, says he strives for, needs to become as good as the old-school reference tomes at making its authors stand behind their work.
This, I realize, puts me in the camp of the fusties, librarians and the like who prefer to steer people to sources that are trustworthy rather than quick-and-easy or, in the case of Wikipedia, trendy.
But I'm not one of the Wikipedia bashers, either. It's a good, often great, first reference, an amazing feat of predominantly quality work and a refutation to those who would argue that you can't coax good work out of people without paying them.
I'm impressed, too, by Wales' candor when he says, in an interview, "People definitely should not be using Wikipedia as a primary source. The real story there is, Why were they ever?"
But no matter whether it strives to be the last word on a subject or the first, requiring authorial responsibility is the right and obvious thing for Wikipedia to do.
