It might have been 2005's most enduring and sobering lesson for journalists and researchers: Beware of Wikipedia.
For those of you who are not computer-savvy, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that has between 700,000 and 2 million articles and nearly 13 million users. According to a late December story in the Boston Globe, Wikipedia "has become ubiquitous on the Web, in the press, and in the classroom."
There's just one problem with Wikipedia ubiquity: The site isn't always accurate.
No one knows that better than John Seigenthaler Sr., a retired editor of The Tennessean of Nashville and former editorial page editor of USA Today. Seigenthaler also founded the First Amendment Center in Nashville. In the 1960s, he was an administrative assistant to then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. In 1968, Seigenthaler was one of the pallbearers at Kennedy's funeral. (By that time, Kennedy was a U.S. senator from New York who had been assassinated after winning the California presidential primary.)
In early November, Seigenthaler talked to members of the Trotter Group, an organization of black columnists. One of the topics was a biography of Seigenthaler that appeared on Wikipedia.
"John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's," the bio read. "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."
It should have stopped there. In fact, it shouldn't have gone that far. But there was more.
"John Seigenthaler moved to the Soviet Union in 1971," the "bio" continued, "and returned to the United States in 1984. He started one of the country's largest public relations firms shortly thereafter."
I got the feeling that when Seigenthaler talked to the Trotterites in Nashville, he wasn't sure what he was going to do. Either I was wrong or by late November Seigenthaler had made up his mind exactly what he was going to do: He took the offensive.
In a blistering op-ed column that ran in USA Today, Seigenthaler, perhaps being a bit too kind, referred to the "biography" as "Internet character assassination." He got honchos at Wikipedia to remove the lies in his "bio," which had remained there for 132 days. Then he got the same concession from the folks at Reference.com and Answers.com, which had repeated the falsehoods.
