Incident with a biography of John Seigenthaler

On May 26, 2005, an anonymous user posted a biographical article on John Sayngentler in the English-language version of Wikipedia, containing fictitious data about the life and work of John Saygentaler, among which was information about the allegedly long-term residence of Saygenthaler in the USSR and his involvement in the killings of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy . As it turned out later, the author of the publication was a certain Brian Chase, manager of the Rush Delivery courier company in Nashville , Tennessee , who, according to him, wrote this article and posted it on Wikipedia as a joke on his friend, whose family supported Friendship with John Seengentaler’s family.

In September 2005, Victor Johnson, Jr., a friend of Seigenthaler, discovered the article and informed him about it. John sent this information to friends and colleagues. On September 23, the partner of Saygentaler copied his official biography from the Freedom Forum website to Wikipedia. The next day, the edit was canceled by one of the editors of Wikipedia, who considered that the new text was not free for distribution, and returned the old version of the article. Eric Newton reported this to his agent in New York , at a meeting of the Committee to Protect the Rights of Journalists. In October 2005, Socialgenter contacted Jimmy Wales , who corrected the article and closed public access to the history of the edits. However, a number of mirrors independent of Wikipedia for several weeks showed the old version of the article.

On November 29, 2005, Saygentaler wrote an article about the incident for USA Today , in which he calls Wikipedia "an incorrect and irresponsible research tool." For " The Tennessean ", Saygentaler prepared an extended version of the same article, where he reported on his unsuccessful attempts to find an anonymous editor who posted his false biography. He asked BellSouth , an anonymous Internet provider , to identify the user by IP address , but the company refused to do so without a court decision.

Daniel Brandt, an anti-wikipedia activist from San Antonio , the creator of the Wikipedia Watch website, discovered that the anonymous IP was owned by Rush Delivery, which he reported to Sayngalera, the press, and published this information on his website.

On December 9, 2005, Brian Chace admitted to the newspaper The Tenessean that he posted false information about the Social Agent on Wikipedia, and wrote an apology letter to the Customer Center ^[1] . After that, he was fired from the company. The social agent did not sue Chace, moreover, he asked Rush Delivery to return the work, which was done. In an interview with the press, he noted that most of all he was afraid that, as a result of possible false edits of articles on politics, the government would have to control the Internet.

On December 13, 2005, in an interview with BusinessWeek , Wales gave the reasons why the mystification went unnoticed for so long, and suggested steps that can be taken to avoid a repetition of what happened. He noted that there are so many new articles that moderators do not have time to check their authenticity. Therefore, a new rule was temporarily introduced that new articles can be created only by registered users ^[2] , the need of which was also emphasized by Saygentaler in his criticism of Wikipedia. However, registration is not required to make changes to existing articles.

Wales also suggested that the encyclopedia as a whole (regardless of whether it is printed or electronic) cannot be used as a primary source and cannot be considered fully authoritative (as some people think), but nevertheless Wikipedia is more reliable as a source of reference materials. in different areas of knowledge than other online sources. Wales called Wikipedia "unfinished work."

Partial changes were made to the Wikipedia software and user manuals. Thus, on December 17, 2005 , new instructions “Biographies of living persons” appeared (in Russian Wikipedia, a similar rule is “Biographies of Contemporaries”), tightening the requirements for verifiability, neutrality and style, in particular, requiring the removal of unconfirmed questionable information about contemporaries instead of the typical source request situations ^[3] . New categories were created for the biographies of living people.

• Freedom of encyclopedic words - an article about the incident in Lente.ru , December 6, 2005
• Reputation of a company in Wikipedia: mystifications, ambiguous facts and “wars of edits.” How a Kennedy killer was made from a writer