Will Seigenthaler get Congressional hearings to end online anonymity?

[Originally published on a weblog called “What Is Liberalism?”]

It is frightening to think about where this might go. John Seigenthaler has been libeled in Wikipedia, and now his goal seems to be to get as much publicity as possible about his wrong, possibly with an aim toward Congressional hearings that might lead to the disallowing of this kind of anonymous writing in the future. Perhaps he will not get very far, but he is a sign of the times – that happy era when Congress kept its hands off the Internet is coming to an end, and greater regulation is sure to follow.

Journalist John Seigenthaler wrote of his anguish after learning that an anonymous ‘volunteer’ had penned and posted—for all the world to see—an untrue biography that described him as having been briefly suspected of involvement in the assassinations of both John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.

After four months, Seigenthaler was finally able to get Wales to remove the offending piece from Wikipedia and from the other online ‘resources’ that simply copy from Wales’ pool of data, but not before it had been read by tens of thousands of people, who may or may not have repeated, copied or stored the nonsense.

Despite his best endeavors, Seigenthaler was not able to identify the ‘author’ of the Wikipedia material, such was the intention of Wales when he created his website. As many people know and as Seigenthaler has now discovered, accoutability, reliability and truth are in short supply on the Internet and their antithisis are being distributed by Wikipedia.

Danah Boyd has done her usual wonderful job of summing up the issues at hand:

So, when i heard about Seigenthaler, i rolled my eyes. Welcome to being a public figure – people will say mean things about you on the web. None of it is guaranteed to be true – it’s the web. (Of course, my view probably stems from being a native web kid – no one likes the meannies but we’ve gotten used to it.) Wikipedia is better than most of the web because YOU CAN CHANGE IT. And if you inform them that someone is acting in a malicious way, Wikipedians will actually track it to keep it neutral. Can you even imagine Google doing that for every webpage out there? Ha ha ha ha ha. Try getting an article that is libelous removed from the Google index, like a mean-spirited blog entry. Not going to happen (unless you’re Scientology).

Seigenthaler had a very reasonable conversation with Wikipedia, telling them of the troubles. Wikipedia, in Wikipedia-form, acted immediately to remedy the situation, even volunteering to remove the history. I applauded them. And then Seigenthaler wrote a rather mean-spirited, anti-Wikipedia opinion piece in the USA Today. He went around calling for the end to Wikipedia. Uncool. I was outraged.

What pissed me off more was how the academic community pointed to this case and went “See! See! Wikipedia is terrible! We must protest it and stop it! It’s ruining our schools!” All of a sudden, i found myself defending Wikipedia to academics instead of reminding the pro-Wikipedians of its limitations in academia. I kept pointing out that they wouldn’t let students cite from encyclopedias either. I reminded folks that the answer is not to protest it, but to teach students how to read it and to understand its strengths and limitations. To actually TEACH students to interpret web material. I reminded academics that Wikipedia provides information to people who don’t have access to books and that mostly-good information is far better than none. Most importantly, i reminded academics that the vast majority of articles on Wikipedia are super solid and if they had a problem with them, they could fix them. Academics have a lot of knowledge, but all too often they forget that they are teachers and that there is great value in teaching the masses, not just the small number of students who will help their careers progress. Alas, public education has been devalued and information elitism is rampant in an age where we finally have the tools to make knowledge more accessible. Sad. (And one of the many things that is making me disillusioned with academia these days.) I found myself being the Wikipedia promoter because i found the extreme academic viewpoint to be just as egregious as the extreme Wikipedia viewpoint.

The value of wikis to society at large are best summed up in this post by Jonathon Delacour:

Until yesterday morning the word “wiki” made me feel nauseous.

I’ve been thinking lately that our “freedom” to have and express opinions is based on an illusion: that we are, more often than not, prisoners of the ideas and emotions we derive such pleasure from articulating. So I’ve started to see strongly held convictions more as calcified thoughts and feelings, multiple layers, one formed upon another, created from our upbringing and experiences, that constrain our ability to experience the world in all its richness and complexity.

In this particular case—The Case of the Wiki—my antipathy towards most kinds of collective activity meant that I was totally unsympathetic to a writing environment in which “there is no prior review before modifications are accepted, [with] most wikis [being] open to the general public—or at least anyone who has access to the wiki server”….

Yesterday morning, I was talking to Marius Coomans on the phone about a Web-related project when he suddenly asked me: “What do you think about wikis?”

My Pavlovian response? “Just the idea of semi-literate fools modifying my scintillating insights and/or my carefully crafted prose makes me feel sick.”

Marius knows me well enough not to be deterred.

“Have you ever used the Wikipedia?”

“Actually, I use it quite a lot. In fact one of my default Firefox pages at the moment is a Wikipedia entry about The Mind-body problem.”

(One of my thousands of unfinished weblog entries deals with Subjective idealism.)

“Well, the Wikipedia is a wiki,” said Marius.

“But the Wikipedia is different”, I replied. “They wouldn’t allow just anyone to go in and modify an entry. It’s moderated.”

As I was making this uninformed assertion, I switched to my Wikipedia tab in Firefox and clicked on the edit link next to the “Philosophical Perspectives” heading. (I hadn’t yet noticed the “edit this page” tab at the top of the page).

I fully expected a dialog box to appear, asking me to supply a username and password. Instead the entry appeared in an inline text area, ready for editing. I nearly fell off my chair.

“Holy shit!” I exclaimed. Marius chuckled.

“What’s to stop people adding incorrect information?”

“The fact that someone will come along and correct it.”

“Have you edited entries”, I asked him.

“Of course”, he replied. “I’ve added a bunch of books to the Glenn Gould entry. You should check the Wikipedia entry for something you know a lot about and see if there’s anything you want to add or fix. Someone as anal-retentive as you will feel right at home.”

I realized then that I’d only ever used the Wikipedia to research subjects I knew little or nothing about—the possibility of changing anything had never occured to me. So, as soon as Marius and I had finished chatting, I found the Wikipedia entry on Ozu. (I’ve been watching lots of Ozu DVDs lately.) The following sentence caught my eye:

During WW II he served in China.

“Bullshit!” I said to myself. Ozu had returned from China before World War II started. During World War II he served in Singapore (if you define watching confiscated American movies as “serving”). You could say “During the Pacific War he served in China” but the problem there is that people frequently confuse the Pacific War (1937-1945) with the Pacific Theater of World War II. As the Wikipedia entry explains:

The Pacific War, which took place mostly in the Pacific Ocean, its islands, and in Asia, both preceded World War II and also included some of its major campaigns and events.

Marius had explained that, although you can edit Wikipedia pages without becoming a registered user, your changes will be identified by an IP address rather than by name. To hell with that, I told him, authorship is crucial!

I registered as a user and replaced the “offending” sentence with a paragraph about Ozu’s army service in China and Singapore.

Shelley Power’s points out that Wikipedia is more structured and more disciplined than most people understand:

There is considerably more organization to Wikipedia than meets the eye. For instance, not all user accounts are treated equally, and specific types of users can be banned from Wikipedia access. One such type of user is known as a sock puppet or, more typically, sockpuppet.

A sockpuppet is a Wikipedia contributor who writes under multiple accounts for nefarious purposes. I discovered the concept of ’sockpuppet’, when a Wikipedia editor decided to investigate those responding to the AFD (Articles For Deletion) page associated with my entry.

According to the editor, Samw:

I took the liberty of commenting on possible sockpuppets on this AFD and IMHO they are all real users: or someone is patiently taking months to build up sockpuppet accounts. I don’t know who Shelley Powers is but she obviously influences “lurkers” on Wikipedia. Shelley, well done!

Contrary to popular assumption, there are levels of trust attached to Wikipedia contributors. True, anyone can edit; but the value of your edit is proportional to your previous contributions. In the case of those who voted to ‘Keep’ my entry, and based on a history of previous contributions, Samw decided that the respondents were ‘real’ and therefore ‘valid’. However, he judged previous contributions to be sparse by Wikipedia standards, and therefore several of the respondents were classified as ‘lurkers’.

Is being a lurker bad? There is no qualification of such one way or another in the Wikipedia guidelines about lurkers, as there is for sockpuppets. The latter, though, is strongly discouraged and if an account is identified as a sockpuppeteer, will be labeled as such and the account blocked.

Having multiple accounts is not the same as being a sockpuppeteer, as there can be legitimate reasons for such. For instance, one of the board members of Wikipedia has two accounts: one each for contributions in two difference languages. Accepted practice (become familiar with this concept if you work in Wikipedia frequently) is to link the multiple accounts together–to demonstrate that there is no intention to deceive.

It is intent to deceive or to dabble in malicious mischief that sets a sock puppeteer apart from a legitimate user with multiple accounts. Sockpuppet accounts are either created deliberately in order to vote multiple times, or to setup “straw man sock puppets” in order to provide weak counter-arguments.