I don’t often identify with members of the Kennedy clan in America, but I couldn’t help but sympathise with complaints about the premature demise of Senator Edward Kennedy on Obama’s inauguration day. Marcel Berlins uses this as a starting point in his complaint about Wikipedia in the Guardian newspaper. Apparently several entries record the death of the senator despite the fact that he is still in the land of the living.
Writing nonsense about people is not the primary problem here – and not the issue Berlins is tackling. Most people who have found themselves written about in various media ask serious questions about accuracy. But Wikipedia is being used by many people as an authoritative encyclopaedic tool for gaining quick information or biographical data.
These days I dread being introduced at engagements where I am speaking. The host invariably draws out a piece of printed paper and the rumour of Wikipedia starts to waft in the direction of my suspicions.
Six months ago, after I had spent a morning addressing a couple of hundred people in the south-east of England at a day conference, the organiser told me that we had something in common: a Downs Syndrome son. This surprised me a little, but I quickly realised what was going on. She had drawn my biography from Wikipedia and found the final statement: ‘Baines married Linda in 1980 and they have three children: Richard …, Melanie … and Andrew … who has Down’s Syndrome.’
Andrew does not have Down’s Syndrome. Yet over the last five years my Wikipedia entry has had him variously described as ‘mentally retarded’, mentally sub-normal’ and ‘mentally handicapped’. I can only guess that one of his mates kept adding this to the entry. But, every time I removed it, it (or some variation on the theme) went back on. In the end I just gave up.
I guess this is inevitable, given the medium, but it is also both worrying and annoying. Clearly, people read this stuff and assume it is fact – a bit like me reading the Herald newspaper in Zimbabwe one day in 2007 only to find myself quoted on the front page being supportive of Mugabe and finding no problems in the country ‘Bishop slams UK media lies’).
I wonder what this sort of thing will do to people’s perceptions of reality and trust in what looks like ‘fact’. What worries me is that it can lead to the sort of misguided, but dangerous, misrepresentations that saw a paediatrician in Portsmouth attacked by ignorant hordes as a ‘paedophile’.
Truth matters. So does accuracy. If you think this is an over-reaction, then just wait until you find yourself the victim of this stuff and discover that the ‘orthodoxy’ about you contains this sort of nonsense. It is not for nothing that the ninth Commandment says: ‘Do not bear false witness against your neighbour.’
January 29, 2009 at 7:31 am
Really annoying problem, Nick. It’s the old Mark Twain “Reports of my death much exaggerated,” but you’d think there’d be a way to straighten it out.
January 29, 2009 at 6:08 pm
On the radio the other day an employee of Wikipaedia was saying that becasue fo this kind fo problem tehy are going to introduce a system of moderation so that innaccurate and malicious entries are blocked. Seems like a great idea.