Wikedpedia

John Seigenthaler, the founder of USA Today and close family friend of the Kennedy family, was the subject of allegations that he was directly involved in the assassination of both John F and Bobby Kennedy. The story appeared on the hugely popular Wikipedia website for over four months, and was completely false. Conor Brady reports

'Edit first, then publish" used to be the immutable law of information-processing in the days of 'old media' – print, radio and television. It even survived into the early phases of the internet when most of the news content was generated by people with a background in journalism, accustomed to applying some basic standards of validation to what they put out. But it didn't last very long.

"Publish everything first, then let the reader edit it," became the new maxim. Why not? Now anyone can build a website for a few euro. Editing, evaluating and making judgments is time-consuming, costly and boring. It's so much more fun and so much less trouble to lorry everything up onto the site without worrying whether it's inaccurate or even harmful.

Hence the rise of the 'blogger', and the concomitant decline of fact-based journalism and reporting that – however imperfectly – attempted to underpin the information it put out with a framework of verifiable detail. In this bizarre new order, anonymous or pseudonymous people put out rumour as if it were fact, invention as if it were science and innuendo as if it had been adjudicated in a court of law.

It becomes especially pernicious when the untruths and the rumours and the fantasies are interspersed among information sources that are valid and reliable. It becomes impossible to know what is true and what is invented. An interview with the State Governor may appear plausible until the reader realises that it is juxtaposed with an article written by a crew-member of an alien craft that has landed at a secret location in the Nevada desert.

Just such an instance of fantasy becoming news – and almost becoming part of the historical record – came to notice in December on the powerful Wikipedia site. The subject was John Seigenthaler, the distinguished US journalist and editor and former trustee and director of the Freedom Forum at Arlington Virginia. I know John Seigenthaler from contacts through the World Editors' Forum. And it is, perhaps, when one knows an individual or when one is familiar with a subject, that one is most likely to be shocked and appalled by the capacity of the new publishing to damage and to misrepresent.

John Seigenthaler is now 78. He is one of the most distinguished figures in US news journalism. He is a former President of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He was a founder director of USA Today. A chair in First Amendment studies at the State University of Middle Tennessee bears his name. He has served on numerous boards and institutions committed to liberty of expression and the attainment of high standards in American journalism.

He chairs the selection committee for the annual Profiles in Courage Awards at the John F Kennedy Library. And he had a fine record as an on-the-ground activist in the Civil Rights campaigns of the 1960s in the Southern states.

So what did Wikipedia tell the world about John Seigenthaler?

There can hardly be a regular user of the internet who does not know Wikipedia and who does not use it from time to time. Founded five years ago by internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosophy teacher Larry Sanger, it is a massive encyclopedia of knowledge, touching on every subject under the sun, accessible in 10 languages, free of charge and beautifully navigable even for the least proficient internet user.

But Wikipedia is not a conventional encyclopedia in which teams of experts sift and check information before it goes to publication. Anyone can edit an item or a page or create a new one. Anyone can add, modify, expand or put in links on any subject or series of subjects. And they can do it anonymously. They may have expert knowledge or none. They may be actuated by the purest of impulses or they may be driven by any motivation from simple vandalism to political fanaticism to good, old-fashioned revenge.

Here is a little of what Wikipedia had to say about Seiganthaler.

"John Seigenthaler Sr was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960s. 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."

When the entry was brought to his attention, Seigenthaler was unsurprisingly outraged. Just one sentence in the lengthy biography was true – he did indeed work with Bobby Kennedy in the 1960s. But far from being suspected of having anything to do with the Kennedy killings, Seigenthaler was and remains a close personal friend of the Kennedy family. Indeed, his niece, Amy Seigenthaler, served in Dublin at the US Embassy as personal assistant to Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith.

Seigenthaler first attempted to have the allegations removed from the site. He received emails from the "Abuse Team" at Wikipedia. But the material remained in place. He made contact with Jimmy Wales. Wales told him he had no way of knowing who supplied the false information. By now, it had been duplicated to two other encyclopedia websites. Finally Seigenthaler wrote an article in USA Today.

"This is a highly personal story about internet character assassination," he wrote. "It could be your story." He added, "I have no idea whose sick mind conceived the false, malicious 'biography' that appeared under my name for 132 days on Wikipedia, the popular, online, free encyclopedia whose authors are unknown and virtually untraceable." Through some clever detective work and a lot of technical know-how, the authorship of the falsehoods about John Seigenthaler was traced to a prankster in Nashville, Tennessee. Wikipedia's "Abuse Team" eventually removed the offending material but it had been displayed in the site for 132 days. Small consolation – and a travesty of what good journalism should be about.

Conor Brady is Editor Emeritus of the Irish Times. He is a senior teaching fellow at the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business at UCD where he lectures in modern media