Three Way News

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Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Oh, do shut up

D sent us this link to the Wikipedia Class Action (WCA) website. I am irritated.

First, you don't just get to declare yourself a class action. You file a lawsuit and ask a judge to certify individual plaintiffs as representative of an entire class. We've got a class looking for plaintiffs, which puts the cart in front of the horse.

The website does mention John Seigenthaler, a victim of a malicious posting on the Wikipedia. This week, Brian Chase admitted that he had posted this:

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 would be interesting to know how many people actually looked up Seigenthaler in the Wikipedia before the information was corrected. That number is likely unavailable. When someone did look at the page, he or she contacted Seigenthaler, who contacted the Wikipedia, and the correction was made.

The WCA makes this laughable claim:

Untrue information posted to Wikipedia, as fact, by an anonymous 'volunteer' (Brian Chase, 38, a resident of Nashville, TN was later exposed as the person behind the lie) suggesting that journalist John Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy was eventually removed by Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales, but only after more than four months anguish and hard work by Seigenthaler.

The plain meaning of this statement is that Seigenthaler worked hard for 4 months before the Wikipedia article was corrected. This is just false. The article existed for 4 months with few people knowing about it. Seigenthaler scrupulously avoids saying when he learned of the page. I'm betting that the page was corrected the day Seigenthaler first learned about it.

Look, Wiki is a tool for collaborative editing. Like all tools, it can be used for good or ill. If we get rid of all the axes, we won't have any more axe murderers. But we'd also miss out on that great scene in The Shining. It's a double-edged sword. (Getting rid of double-edged swords, on the other hand, is just common sense. Imagine a world without Conan movies. Heaven.)

There are wonderful, positive, exciting ways too use the Wiki tool and the Wikipedia. Destroying the Wikipedia because of limited abuses is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. And why, oh why, would you do that? Especially after going to all the trouble of washing the baby?