Hi everyone,

As you may have seen in the news recently, a false, defamatory story was posted to Wikipedia (a new, emerging form on collaborative online encyclopedia that is written and edited by anyone). The entry was posted as a joke about a person by the name of John Seigenthaler Sr., a former member of the Kennedy administration … it claimed he was implicated in the assasination of JFK. Read more about it here.

When John Seigenthaler Sr. found out about the piece, he was understandably furious, and wrote an Op-Ed piece in USA Today about the matter. Eventually, a little volunteer Internet sleuthing by a person named Daniel Chase uncovered the author of the story, 38 year old Brian Chase of Nashville, TN.

Mr. Chase admitted his role in the article, saying it was a joke, thinking WikiPedia was a "gag" website. He resigned from his job and apologized personally. Although Mr. Seigenthaler accepted the apology and urged Mr. Chase’s boss to rehire him, he’s still out of a job.

This story has created shockwaves on the Internet. The "Web 2.0", or the read-write web (blogs, podcasting, wikis, etc. are all user-controlled publishing mediums) is under attack, simply for the reason that people rely on what they see on the web without corroborating sources.

The future of Wikipedia remains unclear; it is an international initiative with a great deal of excellent material. However, unless the information can be independently verified, the material within it may be suspect. Here’s an alleged email from the New York Times’ business editor to his staff instructing them not to use it to fact-check any information. That’s wise … not sure the decision to do that in the first place was all that intelligent … but I digress.

The point of my post is to raise awareness of this issue and let everyone know they should be careful how they interpret what is on the Internet. Everything you see – even the information in this posting – is suspect unless you can corroborate it. The popularity of blogs, wikis, podcasts, and the like is not likely to suffer much, but, detractors will have good and valid ammunition to use in arguments against the technology.

Stay tuned…

-kj-