My friend John Siegenthaler, whom I know from my affiliation with the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center, recently published an op-ed in USA Today about his experience with Wikipedia — it turns out that some malicious, anonymous Wikipedia author crafted an utterly false “biographical” entry for Siegenthaler.

I won’t repost what the bogus Wikipedia entry said — best to err on the side of not repeating anything defamatory — but you can read the details in Seigenthaler’s op-ed here.

I know and love John Siegenthaler, and I too have been the subject of the occasional online defamation, but it seems worth noting that John could have
corrected the Wikipedia entry himself. Because I know John, I know he’s perfectly capable of learning how to edit a Wikipedia entry. (He was, after all, a newspaper editor well into the age of computerized editing, during most of which it was a lot harder to edit electronic copy than it is to fix a Wikipedia entry.) This isn’t the answer to the entire problem of Wikipedia defamation, but it’s one answer to the prospective component of it.

The larger problem of how to make defamers accountable, given Sec. 230 of the Communications Decency Act and the general unwillingness of service providers to help identify abusers, is of course not unique to Wikimedia — Siegenthaler could have been defamed anywhere on the Web and run into similar problems. This is a problem as old as the Internet itself — nothing about Wikipedia makes it any newer.

(That, as John points out, Answers.com and Reference.com uncritically import Wikipedia content is also troubling, because they effectively strip Wikipedia of one of its central virtues — that it’s instantly correctable.)

Don’t get me wrong — I don’t think what was done to Siegenthaler was harmless. It was obviously hurtful. (I do think it’s worth asking whether his reputation was damaged, however, given that anybody — at all — who knows Siegenthaler and his reputation would necessarily know that the Wikipedia “bio” entry was bogus.)

But the real question isn’t whether this was hurtful. Instead, it’s
whether there is any obvious fix for the hurt. Yes, you could eliminate
anonymity, but would that fix things — especially since Wikipedians routinely use pseudonyms even when they’re not anonymous, and since crafting an identity to participate in Wikipedia would be trivial? At what price? Should you really have
to register as a Wikipedia user in order to fix a typo, a grammatical error, an incorrect historical date?

(Note by the way that John himself didn’t offer in his op-ed a proposal for how to fix this, although he implicitly blames anonymity for the problem.)

Furthermore, are the harms here specific to Wikipedia? Isn’t the reality here
that anything published anywhere on the Web may be defamatory? With the ever-present risk that nobody can be found to sue, or else that there’s
nobody worth suing?

And what should we make of the fact that it’s easy to fix Wikipedia entries, and far
more difficult to fix About.com or Reference.com entries — and even more
difficult to fix false information on the Web generally?

To me, the notable thing about this incident is that it seems to have given
John and others doubts about Wikipedia in particular, when in fact the
problems he sees are endemic to the Web and the Internet at large.

These are real issues, but they’re not specific to Wikipedia, which does
more than most online offerings to facilite correcting the problems.

By the way, take a look at the current entry on Siegenthaler now. Note that there’s also an external link on that page to Siegenthaler’s USA TODAY op-ed.