Truth and Fiction on the Web.

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Author: Bates, Mary Ellen mbates@BatesInfo.com

As I write this, the library e-mail discussion lists and blogosphere are atwitter with the latest flapdoodle about Wikipedia. In May of 2005, a Nashville man created an entry in Wikipedia about John Seigenthaler, an administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy in the early 1960s. Among other things, the article falsely said that Seigenthaler was once thought to have been involved in Kennedy's assassination. (Brian Chase, the person who wrote the false article, later admitted to writing it in order to play a joke on a colleague.) Seigenthaler himself discovered the article in September 2005 and eventually had the article corrected, although he also wrote an op-ed piece for USA Today claiming that, "Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool." Jimmy Wales, the founder (or co-founder--it's a matter of debate) of Wikipedia and president of the Wikipedia Foundation, has been doing damage control ever since, particularly since both Seigenthaler and Wales have been interviewed extensively in the media.

One of the first actions Wikipedia took to prevent, or at least minimize, intentionally false information from being added to Wikipedia was to require that anyone adding a new article in the English-language version of the project must first register; no more anonymous contributions. (Changes to existing Wikipedia articles can still be done by unregistered users.) As a side note, I am always distressed when I read reviews of Wikipedia in which the reviewer has intentionally inserted false information into a Wikipedia article in order to test how quickly it gets corrected. To me, this is equivalent to real-life vandalism--spray painting the side of a building to see how quickly the owner gets the graffiti removed.

Interestingly, and partly in response to the controversy surrounding the Seigenthaler entry, the journal Nature conducted a comparison of scientific topics in both Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. The study, published in the Dec. 14, 2005, issue, found that there were, on average, three "inaccuracies" (which it defined as factual errors, omissions, or misleading statements) in a Britannica article and four in a Wikipedia article. Not bad for a resource that is created and maintained by "amateurs," or enthusiasts, rather than paid experts. Interestingly, the Nature article also surveyed 1,000 readers to see how many use and/or update Wikipedia. The answer: 17 percent use Wikipedia regularly, but less than 10 percent contribute to articles. We info pros should take this as a challenge to do our part to contribute to the accuracy of the Wikipedia by checking articles that are about our organization or other topic with which we're familiar and making changes if we see errors.

Another controversy regarding information happened during the last few weeks of 2005. According to news reports, in October 2005, a University of Massachusetts. Dartmouth, student requested an interlibrary loan of a copy of Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, known in the 1960s as The Little Red Book. The student told his history professor that, after making his ILL request, he was visited by an agent from the Department of Homeland Security, who informed him that the book was on a "watch list." His professor mentioned this to a reporter, who led a story about government surveillance with this news. It quickly became a hot item on blogs, although library-savvy bloggers noted a number of problems with the story, including the student's claim that he provided his Social Security number on his ILL request (UMass Dartmouth doesn't allow use of Social Security numbers for identification and the ILL form doesn't ask for Social Security numbers), and the fact that the copy of the book the student claimed to have received came from outside the UMass library consortium. And sure enough, the student-who remains unnamed--confessed a week later that the whole story was a hoax, but not before it was covered in newspapers around the country and even mentioned in aped pieces by Molly Ivins and Sen. Edward Kennedy.

What I find interesting about both of these events is that, while much of the debate occurred on blogs and e-mail discussion lists, people who wouldn't know a blog from a toaster have heard about these problems on CNN or in their local newspaper. Pile on top of that the seemingly weekly stories about the dangers of identity theft and that you are always just one mouse-click from stumbling onto child-porn Web sites, and I can see why a lot of folks are treating much of the Net as if it were a seedy neighborhood in the bad part of town. The challenge we info pros face is to manage the expectations of our clients and patrons, and teach them how to trust, but verify. There are liars out there on the Web, but there are good guys, too.

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By Mary Ellen Bates

Mary Ellen Bates (mbates@BatesInfo.com, www.BatesInfo.com) plans on borrowing the Little Red Book through ILL, just for fun.