[WikiEN-l] Re: A school teacher's wiki-like classroom experiment

Fri Feb 3 21:45:37 UTC 2006

Steve Bennett wrote:
>>From the article:
> 
>>Last November, false information was appended to the Wiki biography
> 
> of American journalist John Seigenthaler Sr., suggesting he played a
> role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The erroneous facts made
> their way into the mainstream media as truth.
> 
> Is this true? I hadn't heard that anyone had actually relayed the
> information as truth. There was speculation about how many millions of
> internet viewers had believed the article (without any of them
> correcting it), but I hadn't heard this.

It is 100% false.  The simple fact remains that *now* this little tidbit
is permanently on the Internet, because *Seigtenthaler* published in USA
Today and went on multiple television news programs to talk about it.

Had it done nothing, it would be like any of millions of other little
vandalisms of Wikipedia that are fixed and in the history, but never to
be seen again.

There are other factual errors as well.  It is not true that "Last
November, false information was appended" -- in fact the false
information was *removed* in *October*.  Other outlets like to report
that it took Seigenthaler 4 months to get us to correct it -- whereas it
was corrected within minutes of course.

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