WikiCritic comment: my recollection of the Seigenthaler incident

WikiCritic comment
Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seigenthaler
Relevant credential: co-founder of Wikipedia
First-hand witness: I received a telephone call from John Seigenthaler, Sr. in the fall of 2005 regarding the defamatory content in his Wikipedia biography.
Comment tags: talkback (maybe?)

My comment is not a review of the article, but a little piece of history about it. It was, I vaguely recall, the fall of 2005 when I received a telephone call quite out of the blue from the elderly John Seigenthaler, Sr. He was quite irate. It took him a little while to make his concerns clear to me (he had to share a fair bit of his very interesting history), but eventually I understood what had happened. Someone had edited his Wikipedia article in such a way as to imply that he was a communist and that he had been implicated—but never arrested—in the deaths of the Kennedys, both John and Robert. I vaguely recall a second, follow-up telephone call, I forget precisely why. The problem seemed to have been resolved by the time we had the first conversation.

The rest of the story is well known, so it is not really necessary for me to re-tell it. But I just want to record what I learned directly from the man himself. His life work and reputation had been besmirched by some random person on the internet; but I was left with the impression (which I have to the day) that he was never really all that bothered by that. He was bothered, rather, that the system had been set up in such an irresponsible way. I tried to explain as best as I could, but I had to agree with him about the failures of Wikipedia to prevent libel.

This incident had two effects. First, it inspired a huge amount of attention on the very question of “Biographies of Living Persons.” Unfortunately, libel on Wikipedia continues to this very day to be a very serious concern. Second, I personally became convinced that I bore a personal responsibility to undo some of the damage that I had done by inflicting what I later came to call an “engine of defamation.” In fall 2005, it was already 3.5 years since I had had any official authority over Wikipedia, a fact that Mr. Seigenthaler knew. No matter; he and I both knew that the consequences of one’s own actions can follow him for his entire lifetime.

The article and Seigenthaler himself (in USA Today) both say that he contacted Jimmy Wales, adding that Jimmy “removed the false claims.” This might well be true, but I can’t confirm it; that is, I think I would remember if it was him who had fixed the problem, but I don’t recall who fixed it. The interesting thing is that we have no way to check on the claim because Wikipedia has completely erased the embarrassing origins of its “John Seigenthaler” article. The first edit in the present Wikipedia article history is dated September 24, 2005, with an edit summary of “Rewritten to remove copyvio.” That was not, in fact, the first edit; there were at least two in the previous four months. As the present article text says, “On May 26, 2005, an unregistered Wikipedia user created a five-sentence biographical article about Seigenthaler that contained false and defamatory content.”

It is doubtless correct that the guilty edit was made May 26, but we cannot check this because it has been scrubbed not just from Wikipedia, but from the Wayback Machine too. You can check for yourself. The first edit in Archive.org is dated September 20, 2004; the second is November 5, 2005. The whole nasty incident could have been left intact in the archives, for the sake of history. But it was erased.

This is a good (and perhaps more innocent) example of how Wikipedia curates its own history by using its ability to delete stuff from the database. The next year, 2006, Wikipedia rolled out “oversighting”—a tool for making it easier to hide an edit from public view, and in a stronger version, to delete a record entirely. And now we have to worry about the same thing happening on Archive.org and on the internet as a whole.

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