"I'm afraid we're going to get regulated
media as a
result of that. And I -- I tell you, I think if you
can't fix it, both fix the history as well as the
biography pages, I think it's going to be in real
trouble, and we're going to have to be fighting to
keep the government from regulating you."
People can decide for themselves if they think that
some "libel" (i.e. 'uncorrected cruft') in one article
will equate to a wider climate of presumably dire and
draconian "government" regulation. I think the claim
is beyond ridiculous, and throwing Kelly's little
laundry list of media errors into the equasion,
Siegenthaler's comments are almost indistinguishable
from an attack on *free media from the point of view
of *corporate media.
No doubt he is sincere, but his interests *seem to be
in protecting the institutional, and not the emergent.
In that context, being diplomatic to Siegenthaler for
Well, I doubt that. His editorial shows that he was able to browse the
revision history of his article and found out the user who inserted
the incorrect statements. It shows that he has technical skills enough
to use the Wikipedia interface and also knows what an "Internet
Protocol address" is. Average 78 year old retired journalists doesn't
understand stuff like that, Seigenthaler apparently does. That makes
me wonder why he didn't correct the errors in his article himself?
Maybe his editorial wouldn't have been published had it read "A
Wikipedia entry about me as incorrect for 132 days, until I came by
and fixed it. Wikipedia rocks!"?
Sorry for the speculation and conspiracy theorizing, but to me it
seems that the purpose of his editorial was to raise hell. An example
of a journalist not reporting news, but creating it himself.
In the real world, things like that are bound to happen. Name one
organisation that hasn't been criticised as harshly as the current
printed media attack on Wikipedia. The media makes their living on
"scandals" like these. There is no reason to panic! Restricting page
creation to only registered users in an attempt to remove possibly
libellous statements from Wikipedia sounds like 100% pure and
irrational panic to me. It also makes it seem like Wikipedia's rule
makers are more concerned with what the media thinks than our own
community thinks - since there is no way in hell such a proposal would
have gotten a majority in democratically held vote.
--
mvh Björn