Ron Livingston, Wikipedia, Google, and the Sourness of Grapes.

I read what you wrote, and I can see that you wished to exculpate yourself from the spin of the WSJ interview.

But your phrasing, wittingly or otherwise, is tributary to a long-running stream of rhetoric that besplatters the victims more than the perps.

So I’m sure you’ll be more anticipatory of that likelihood in future e-missions.

Jon Awbrey

The point is actually the opposite of finding “fault” (your word, not mine) with Livingston, Seigenthaler, or any notable but not massively famous person. The issue is whether Wikipedia has a systemic flaw with these subjects, which happen to make up a significant chunk of its articles. If what’s needed is a flock of passionate followers of the article, then stagnant (or “stable”) editor community is problematic in the long term.

While that may merely give you pause, it makes nauseous most thinking people outside of the Wikipedia sphere of mind-altering influence.

This isn’t about being gay, or not being gay, or not having lots of people “watching” your article. Even articles watched by lots of people suffer the same disgraceful defamation. Do you think the 100 articles about the U.S. senators are watched enough? These 100 articles were viewed approximately 12.8 million times in the fourth quarter of 2007, but they were deliberately wrong 6.8% of the time, and the mean duration of a malicious edit on those articles was 24 hours.

You’re on the wrong path toward resolution of this problem, and that’s disappointing because I would have expected better insight from you.

Here is some data, for any of your readers interested in data rather than platitudes:

http://www.mywikibiz.com/Wikipedia_Vandalism_Study

All these years after Seigenthaler, and all you can come up with is WP:BTV (Blame The Victim) cop-outs like the following:

It’s his fault for not being famous enough to deserve a non-defamatory article.

Then, to top it all off, you amplify the defamation by referring to the Streisand effect:

It’s his fault for trying to censor information — information that “wants to be free” of little details like responsibility and truth.

Oh, and let’s not forget the icing on the cake:

It’s his fault for being a bad old gay-basher.

Well, it has nothing to do with that, as anyone who does any amount of Investigative Journalism at all can see:

It’s the Casting Director Lee Dennison Story!