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Seigenthaler biography incident - Misplaced Pages

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File:Tv cnn John Seigenthaler Sr.jpg
John Seigenthaler Sr. on CNN, 5 December 2005.

The John Seigenthaler Sr. Misplaced Pages biography controversy occurred in 2005 after an anonymous editor posted a hoax in the Misplaced Pages entry for John Seigenthaler Sr. in May. In September 2005, Victor S. Johnson, Jr., an old friend of Seigenthaler's, discovered the entry, which suggested that Seigenthaler may have had a role in the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. Demonstrably false statements in the article included claims that Seigenthaler lived in the Soviet Union from 1971 to 1984, and that he was the founder of a public relations firm. Seigenthaler's brother founded a PR firm which bears the family name, but John Seigenthaler has no role in it.

After Johnson alerted him to the article, Seigenthaler contacted Misplaced Pages founder Jimmy Wales in October 2005, and Wales took the unusual step of having the false information deleted from Misplaced Pages version logs. As a result, the unredacted versions of the article can be viewed only by Misplaced Pages administrators. The false statements were added on May 26, 2005 so they had remained uncorrected for at least four months. Several "mirror" websites not controlled by Misplaced Pages continued to display the inaccurate article for several weeks following Misplaced Pages's action. It is not known how many people actually saw the libelous entry before it was corrected.

On November 29, 2005, an op-ed article by Seigenthaler appeared in USA Today, describing the particulars of the incident. It included a verbatim reposting of the falsehoods in question:

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

Seigenthaler detailed his own failed attempts to identify the person who posted the inaccurate biography to Misplaced Pages anonymously. He reported asking the poster's Internet service provider, BellSouth, to identify its user. He criticized Misplaced Pages for offering inaccurate material to a wide audience.

An expanded version was published several days later in The Tennessean where Seigenthaler was editor-in-chief in the 1970s.

On December 9, Brian Chase, a 38 year old operations manager at Rush Delivery in Nashville, admitted to Seigenthaler he had placed the allegations there to play a joke on a colleague. Chase then resigned from his job at Rush Delivery for his misuse of Rush equipment during the hoax.

Reaction

The incident has garnered Misplaced Pages a great deal of coverage in the press, much of it unfavorable.

Brit Hume announced on Fox News's "Special Report" that false information linking Seigenthaler to the assassination of the 35th president had "finally been removed" from Misplaced Pages, which he characterized as "calling itself an encyclopedia", but which was "in fact an open site in which anyone can enter erroneous information and where factual errors abound".

In the USA Today article Seigenthaler makes the claim that Misplaced Pages is a "flawed and irresponsible research tool". Several other publications have commented on the incident, often criticizing Misplaced Pages (and the open editing model employed by the encyclopedia) as unreliable — with the Seigenthaler incident offered as proof. Partly in response to this scandal, the scientific magazine Nature published a study in December, 2005, in which Misplaced Pages was found to be similar in credibility to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

On December 5, 2005, Seigenthaler and Wales appeared jointly on CNN to discuss the matter. On December 6, 2005, the two were interviewed on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation radio program. There Wales described a new policy he implemented preventing unregistered users from creating new articles on the English-language Misplaced Pages, though they continued to be able to edit existing articles as before.

In the CNN interview, Seigenthaler also raised the spectre of increased government regulation of the Internet:

... Can I just say where I'm worried about this leading. Next year we go into an election year. Every politician is going to find himself or herself subjected to the same sort of outrageous commentary that hit me, and hits others. 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.

In reaction to the controversy, New York Times business editor Larry Ingrassia sent out a memo to his entire staff commenting on the reliability of Misplaced Pages and writing, "We shouldn't be using it to check any information that goes into the newspaper."

Since many people read Seigenthaler's op-ed, and few people responded to the original article, some Misplaced Pages contributors (known as Wikipedians) questioned his reluctance to simply correct the page.

Seigenthaler responded to this in an interview on NPR (National Public Radio). He said that he did not want to have anything to do with Misplaced Pages because he disapproved of its basic assumptions. He also pointed out that the false information had been online for several months before he was aware of it, and that he could not edit Misplaced Pages when he did not even know of the article's existence. Editing Misplaced Pages, he suggested, would lend it his sanction or approval. He believed that editing the article was not enough and instead wanted to expose what he thought are "incurable flaws" in the Misplaced Pages process and ethos.

Chase located

Daniel Brandt, a San Antonio privacy activist who had started the anti-Misplaced Pages "Misplaced Pages Watch" in response to problems he had with his eponymous article, found that the IP address used to create the false biography was the host to a website at an IP address belonging to a BellSouth customer, which contains the text, "Welcome to Rush Delivery". He contacted the company, the media, and Seigenthaler personally.

After receiving a hand-delivered apology and speaking with Chase on the phone, Seigenthaler decided he would not file a suit and urged Rush Delivery to rehire Chase.

One of Rush Delivery's clients was Seigenthaler's late brother Thomas, founder of Seigenthaler Public Relations.

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