The Last Chapter in the Wikipedia Tale?

By | December 11, 2005

So we now know who was behind the Wikipedia Seigenthaler entry : the prankster has confessed.

It started as a joke and ended up as a shot heard round the Internet, with the joker quitting his job and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, suffering a blow to its credibility. A man in Nashville, Tenn., has admitted that, in trying to shock a colleague with a joke, he put false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville.

Brian Chase, 38, who until Friday was an operations manager at a small delivery company, told Seigenthaler he had written the material suggesting Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. Seigenthaler discovered the false entry only recently and wrote about it in an op-ed article in USA Today, saying he was especially annoyed that he could not track down the perpetrator because of Internet privacy laws.

Ah, well. Next question: How many other similar entries are there?

5 thoughts on “The Last Chapter in the Wikipedia Tale?

  1. Akshay

    I still don’t get why this is a big deal. Wikipedia was never meant to be an authoratative source of information. And to those people who say that its slander/libel, I would say that there’s hundreds more websites that say worse.

    Wikipedia’s become nothing more than a scapegoat in the whole old media vs. blogging/new media fight. It’s sad, really.

    Reply
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  3. Kasha

    i’m inclined to agree with akshay. so many articles went out on the topic of wikipedias inacuracy, taking into account one false artical only, and not at all any of the articals that are written by docters, scientests, and lawyers. it was a classic case that the older society (perhaps old fashoned) of journalsts would narrow their reasearch to what they’ve heard their peers complain about instead of having the journalistic sense to consider all facts (or even read the wikipedias FAQ) in thinking about this, the internet is a thret to paied news sources, its faster, and its free, and it covers a wider scope of information. something paper, television and radiowaves simply can’t do.

    if you regect this as a moderator, consiter this line of thought, it may be profitibal to start reporting on the information rights that are being taken away from us, its the biggest crime of our times, and the older generations don’t worry about it because its in issue thats not set in their ways.

    Reply
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    Read this article before you consider paying for a “get rich quick” program.

    From: http://www.jobinfosys.com
    Date: July 17th, 2006

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    Now, I’ve seen a lot of “get rich quick” programs. Most of these people make claims about earning $2000/day with Google or something similarly insane. Almost all of these people are complete liars. Even if they were making $2000/day with Google AdSense, it’d be because they had high- traffic websites with a lot of quality content. I’d know, because in one whole month, I never even made half of what they promised I’d make daily with their programs. Maybe you’ve already been scammed by one of these fraudsters. Anyway, I finally got sick of what was being offered.

    I decided I’d look through the all of the “get rich quick” programs I could find and see if there were any that were actually legitimate. I found that there were owners selling their programs for well over $100, but the information in them could be found almost anywhere online for free. Additionally, they all contained out-of-date information, had no e-mail support, no money back guarantees, and broken links in the downloads section.

    In conclusion, almost all of the programs I found were completely useless. The owners knew it, but they couldn’t care less about their customers since they didn’t offer refund policies! Amazingly, while looking through all of the programs, I actually did find a few legitimate programs. They were run by ordinary people like you and me, and they had found some great methods of making money from their home by doing very little work.

    I spent some time working with those programs, and my income is now ten times what it used to be. These programs provided a large amount of great information on how to make extra money on your computer doing very little work. Numerous customers had provided great feedback and reviews for their products. Many of them have started to make money just days after buying!

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