All Blog Posts from Public Eye

As written in this space earlier this week, the grisly story of professional wrestler Chris Benoit killing his wife and child before hanging himself has more than enough components within it to attract continued attention. As of this writing, a Google News search shows that 1,812 stories have been written on the double murder-suicide.

And the story gets curiouser by the day, as more disturbing and confusing findings of the investigation emerge.

Soon after the story broke, it was reported that Benoit had sent out text messages after he killed his wife.

Hours later, before dawn Sunday morning, Benoit reportedly sent a string of strange text messages to co-workers and neighbors, including, "The dogs are in the enclosed pool area. Garage side door is open." Another said, "My physical address is 130 Green Meadow Lane."

Then, in a tragic development, it was revealed that he had killed his own son using a wrestling maneuver:

[His son] Daniel appeared to have been killed in a chokehold because he had internal neck injuries but no visible bruises, according to Scott Ballard, district attorney for Fayette County.

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A New Media Moment: In the aftermath of the tragedy, Wikipedia shined. "From the contributions of 2,074 editors, at last count, the site created a polished, detailed article on the massacre, with more than 140 separate footnotes, as well as sidebars that profiled the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, and gave a timeline of the attacks," notes the New York Times. The article was visited more than 750,000 times in the two days after the shootings. Wikipedia is not the place to go for original reporting, but it "distinguishes itself by the ability to bring all the facts, and useful background information, together in one place,” says Wikipedia administrator Michael Snow.

An Old Media Oops: The Chicago Sun Times, relying on "an utterly impeccable source," erroneously reported early on that authorities were investigating a Chinese national for the shootings. Jon Friedman talked to the editor and managing editor about the mistake, and they "vigorously defended" the newspaper's work, but Friedman still says they slipped up. "The Sun-Times should have tried a hell of a lot harder to confirm the information," he writes. "It should have had assurances from multiple and reliable sources before it made this proclamation, which had explosive repercussions… A newspaper doesn't have to publish every bit of speculative stuff it receives, even from so-called impeccable sources."

An All Media Kiss Off: Over the weekend, the Virginia Tech student government called on reporters to leave their campus by today, when classes resumed. Students need to return to normal, says spokeswoman Liz Hart, and "[t]he best way to know how to do that is get the campus back to normal." With today's resumption of classes being treated by most news outlets as a newsworthy event, however, there are still plenty of reporters working the campus.

Not So Dapper Don: The weekend doesn't seem to have dampened criticism of Don Imus, the radio host under fire for referring to Rutgers University women's basketball players as "nappy headed ho's." Imus has apologized and said he is "not a racist;" he is scheduled to appear on Al Sharpton's radio show today. (Said Sharpton Saturday: "I accept his apology, just as I want his bosses to accept his resignation.") In the New York Times, David Carr points out that Imus continues to book big name guests from the political and media world, and notes that he "generously provides airtime to those parts of the news media and political apparatus that would generally be expected to bring him to account." Imus' show appears on WFAN, the parent company of which is CBS Radio.

I Got Your Blog Post Right Here: "Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?" wonders the New York Times. ("Yes," responds Public Eye.) The Times writes up an effort to create a blogger code of conduct, which could call on bloggers to ban anonymous comments and delete comments that constitute threat or libel. It's not censorship, says Tim O'Reilly, who is working on the guidelines. He argues that “[f]ree speech is enhanced by civility."

Expert Witness: As Sinbad fans well know, Wikipedia's open-source nature can mean inaccuracies. Citizendium wants to change that – it's meant to be "a smarter, kinder Wikipedia [in which] experts approve all articles posted on the site," as the Los Angeles Times notes. Sounds great, right? Too bad exacting standards mean a whole new set of problems. After six months, "editors have approved only nine of the roughly 1,000 articles that volunteers have written." And the experts may not have the same interests as the unwashed masses: "According to a chart on Wikipedia compiled by one of its contributors, the 20 most-viewed articles in February included 'Anna Nicole Smith,' 'Sex,' 'List of sex positions' and 'World War II.'"

Wikipedia and China are two of our favorite subjects, and the uneasy meeting of the two is the topic of a fascinating story in the International Herald Tribune. Turns out the online encyclopedia, which can be edited by anyone, hasn't gone over all that well with China's censors, and they've frequently blocked access to the site. But Chinese Wikipedia continues to grow "by leaps and bounds" anyway.

It's not quite the same as its American counterpart, however. Entries in Wikipedia China on topics such as Mao Zedong and Taiwan are watered down and sanitized – there's no mention of murder or famine in the Mao entry, for example. The Tiananmen Square massacre doesn't show up at all. And this isn't, as one might think, simply a question of censorship - it's bigger than that. As the IHT notes, the people editing the entries are products of the Chinese educational system, which "provides a neatly sanitized national perspective on sensitive aspects of the country's past." Combine that with the fact that foreign Web sites are often blocked and the media is strictly monitored by the state, and you're left with a situation in which objective information is hard to come by. Many Chinese simply don't have enough information available to them to make their version of Wikipedia more accurately reflect reality.

And even if they did, they'd have to be careful, as China is infamously intolerant of political dissent. The IHT story notes a homegrown online encyclopedia in China called Baidu Baike which apparently copies much of its content from Wikipedia, but makes sure it stays on the right side of government overseers. The editorial policy is centered on not "judging the existing national system with malice." And what, exactly, does that mean? Zhang Yan, a spokesman for the company, explained it to the IHT like this: "Anyone who is Chinese knows."

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High among our many obsessions at Public Eye has been Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia that anyone can help edit. The entire idea of this sort of community venture is certainly enticing in many ways. The thought of taking advantage of everyone’s knowledge and compiling it all in one place sounds positively brilliant. But Wikipedia has not turned out to be all it’s been all that.

We’ve seen the site draw criticism for becoming a place to spread rumor and misinformation or even flat-out lies. There have been disputes over its use as a resource in schools and in journalism. Now, one of Wikipedia’s founders is starting a competitor with an eye towards solving such problems, reports the Financial Times:

The latest venture from Larry Sanger, who helped create Wikipedia in 2001, is intended to bring more order to this creative chaos by drawing on traditional measures of authority. Though still open to submissions from anyone, the power to authorise articles will be given to editors who can prove their expertise, as well as a group of volunteer “constables”, charged with keeping the peace between warring interests.

Accusing Wikipedia of failing to control its writers and editors, he said: “The latest articles don't represent a consensus view – they tend to become what the most persistent ‘posters’ say.”

Will this approach work better? Wikipedia has established itself as sort of the ultimate, open-source resource and it will be an uphill battle to compete with the voluminous material already available there. But maybe they’ll take a page from Sanger’s approach and find a way to add a measure of editorial control over its content to help soothe some of the legitimate concerns.

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The sudden news of the death of Ken Lay last week stirred up some more criticism of Wikipedia, the online, open-sourced encyclopedia. Not long after news of Lay’s death began to break, the wiki entry about the former Enron head began being updated. Early updates claimed that Lay had died of an “apparent suicide.” Later updates corrected that information, accurately reporting that Lay died of a heart attack but then went on to speculate that the massive coronary was brought on by the stress Lay suffered from during and after his fraud trial. The current entry is free of that speculation, but this small flap has given wiki critics another opportunity to weigh in on the value of the Web site. In yesterday’s Washington Post, Web-watcher Frank Ahrens writes:

Unlike, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia has no formal peer review for its articles. They may be written by experts or insane crazy people. Or worse, insane crazy people with an agenda. And Internet access.

Lay's death on Wednesday illustrates the problem, as chronicled by the Reuters news service, which watched the Wikipedia article on Lay evolve with alarming speed and wildly inaccurate reporting.

More:

[H]ere's the dread fear with Wikipedia: It combines the global reach and authoritative bearing of an Internet encyclopedia with the worst elements of radicalized bloggers. You step into a blog, you know what you're getting. But if you search an encyclopedia, it's fair to expect something else. Actual facts, say. At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information.

Some Wikipedia articles contain warnings that concerns have been raised over accuracy. But that's not the same as offering fact-checked data.

I'm a fan of Wikipedia and Wiki notions, such as "citizen journalism." I just want them to be better.

That seems a touch over-the-top for such a short-lived incident and Lost Remote’s Steve Safran offers this take on Ahrens’ wiki criticism:

We get it. Traditional media is wary of Wikipedia. Look - it's simple: Wikipedia is like the rest of the web. It's a source. It's open. It can be messy, it can be elegant. It's a great place to start research, and it's not the final place.

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Back in December, online encyclopedia Wikipedia – written and edited collaboratively by anyone – encountered a nice wollop of Wiki-controversy. You might recall it was jumpstarted by former journalist John Seigenthaler, who penned an op-ed in USA Today about the exercise in “Internet character assassination” that was his Wikipedia biography. It resulted in weeks of controversy about the legitimacy of the oft-cited resource.

And right around then, the science journal Nature “conducted a peer review of scientific entries on Wikipedia and the well-established Encyclopedia Britannica” that concluded Wikipedia “is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica,” wrote BBC News of the study.

Well, Encyclopedia Britannica is none too thrilled with that result, the BBC reports today, calling Nature’s study “fatally flawed,” and requesting that the findings be retracted.

In a document on their website, Encyclopaedia Britannica said that the Nature study contained "a pattern of sloppiness, indifference to basic scholarly standards, and flagrant errors so numerous they completely invalidated the results".

Nature has rejected Britannica’s accusations. Expect a flood of Wiki-commentary in the coming days.

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Just when you thought you’d heard all the controversy you were going to hear in this millennium about Wikipedia – there’s more! It appears that the online encyclopedia has banned computers in House and Senate offices from altering or creating Wikipedia entries. The ban came after an investigation by The Lowell Sun, a Massachusetts newspaper, revealed that staff for Rep. Marty Meehan (D) made changes to his Wikipedia biography “that replaced negative yet accurate information with content having a more positive slant. Among the changes: removing references to Meehan’s promise to serve only eight years,” writes the St. Louis Post Dispatch, adding:

Further review uncovered thousands of changes made to other Wikipedia entries by House and Senate staffers since last summer. Unlike the Meehan edits, however, some changes weren’t complementary. In one instance, someone from the House wrote that Republican Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia “smells like cow dung.” In another, someone removed criticism of Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware from his Wikipedia page.

So, congressional staffers are messing around on the Internet during work hours and comparing political opponents to cow dung. I’m shocked and appalled.

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Over at CJR, Bryan Keefer offers a defense of Wikipedia. After weeks of controversy over its erroneous John Seigenthaler entry last month, Keefer says it’s all been overblown and the open-source encyclopedia has been a victim of a "schadenfreude"-driven MSM campaign. Keefer says Wiki represents the future:

“Part of the argument against Wikipedia rests on the idea that users aren't able to assess the credibility of the information they're reading. In truth, however, Internet users are getting smarter about figuring out whether to believe information they find online (or, for that matter, in major news outlets). Google is a big part of this trend. The search engine produces results based on how many sites link to a given page; the more links to a page, the higher the result. Those links are generated by human beings, who are presumably doing so because they think the information they're linking to is credible (or, at the very least, interesting).



Try dropping ‘Swiffer Wetjet’ into Google, for example. A rumor last year had it that the product, a floor cleaning system, was harmful to household pets. But the first Google results are pages debunking the myth, not propagating it. In other words, the more credible information has risen to the top.”

So the value of Wikipedia, and the Internet, is that the truth will rise to the top, eventually? I wonder, would Mr. Seigenthaler agree? And in spite of company assurance, how can you really be sure your "Swiffer Wetjet" isn't hurting Fluffy? Because Google says so?

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Well, the mystery of the wiki has been solved: On Sunday, the Tennesean reported that Nashvillian Brian Chase created the fake online biography of journalist John Seigenthaler that linked Seigenthaler to the assassinations of two Kennedys – and set off a debate about Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that can be edited by all comers.



Chase said he created the fake Seigenthaler biography in order to play a trick on a coworker – and didn't know anyone used Wikipedia as a serious reference tool. He hand delivered a letter of apology to Seigenthaler and deemed the whole kerfuffle "a joke that went horribly, horribly wrong." Seigenthaler accepted the apology, but said "it doesn't lessen my frustration that anybody can put anything on Wikipedia."



A book indexer named Daniel Brandt helped force Chase into the public eye by tracing the computer used to make the offending entry to a delivery company in Nashville where Chase worked. He subsequently called and emailed the company, and a New York Times reporter called as well, which made employees nervous. Now Chase is out of a job, under somewhat unclear circumstances. From the Times' account:

Mr. Chase resigned from his job because, he said, he did not want to cause problems for his company. Mr. Seigenthaler urged Mr. Chase's boss to rehire him, but Mr. Chase said that, so far, this had not happened.

If you don't want to read the Tennessean or the Times, of course, you can always learn about Chase on – ahem – Wikipedia. And as befits Wikipedia's philosophy, there's also a debate on whether Chase should have an entry in the first place.

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