Wikipedia Prankster Exposed — But This Is Only the Beginning

From the Nashville Tennessean:

The mysterious person behind an “Internet character assassination” of veteran local journalist John Seigenthaler is a Nashvillian who said yesterday he never imagined that what started out as a joke would cause pain and ignite national debate.

Brian Chase, 38, said he created a fake online biography of Seigenthaler in May — linking the man to the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy — to play a trick on his co-worker. He said he didn’t know that the Web site, a free Internet encyclopedia called Wikipedia, was used as a serious reference tool.

Hoo-boy. More background here and here. This story isn’t over by a long shot; it’s bigger than Seigenthaler now.

Update: As if to prove the point, Romenesko published a letter today outlining some of Wikipedia’s shortcomings; it’s well worth a read. As the writer puts it, “It must be admitted that what John Seigenthaler accomplished was letting the cat out of the bag.”

She adds:

Egalitarian editing may be a noble goal, but the reality is that if Wikipedia is to truly fulfill its promise, it needs a way to vet contributors, to let users know whether an entry on neuroscience was written and edited by a senior professor, a student who just took Psych 101, or a layperson who’s paraphrasing an old issue of Scientific American. Certainly prankster Brian Chase’s initial belief that Wikipedia was a joke site says a great deal about how some of its entries appear to the general public.

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