Chapter 14

Volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects

The first time John Seigenthaler was attacked by anonymous cowards was at Montgomery Alabama in May 1961, about two hundred miles south of Jimbo’s birthplace in Huntsville. He had woken up in a hospital X-ray room with a fractured skull and broken ribs, after being struck in the back of the head by a man he never saw, and kicked in the ribs by two others.

Seigenthaler is attacked again more than forty years later. In September 2005, an old friend of his suggests Googling his own name and clicking on the link to the article about him on Wikipedia, where he will find something disturbing. He checks, and finds it says that he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. His jaw drops. He had been a pallbearer at Robert Kennedy’s funeral, and each year he participated in the annual award programs for the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial and the John F. Kennedy Library. The assassination claim is absurd, as is another story about moving to the Soviet Union. When he writes about the incident in USA Today, his article is overrun by editors who fill it with vindictive, spiteful and obscene comments. He is ‘a notorious homosexual nymphomaniac’, a ‘Nazi’, ‘a little turd-gobbler’, a ‘rapist’ and a ‘murderer’.

Even the Klan had been brought down by the law. But, unlike the Klan, or the Mafia, Wikipedia is protected by laws like Section 230. Wikipedia is populated by “volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects. Congress has enabled them and protects them”, complains Seigenthaler.

Seven years later, the problem of revenge editing has never been resolved. As recently as 2013, it is discovered that editor Qworty, in real life an obscure and less than notable novelist, has promoted the article about himself, depicting his work in a highly positive light, while at the same time deleting all positive information from articles about authors who have criticised or belittled him. For example, he changed the cause of writer Barry Hannah’s death from ‘natural causes’ to ‘alcoholism’ , even though Hannah had died of a heart attack and been clean and sober for years before his death.

It all comes back to the perverse incentives of ‘anyone can edit’. Professional writers have no motivation to edit Wikipedia, because they need do this for a living. Even when they offer their time gratis, they are forced to collaborate with people who have different interests, or are incompetent, or insane. There is no formal or official reward system for contributing, and no formal system to control quality. Amateur editors have all kinds of incentives, ranging from self-promotion all the way to naked revenge. Without a mechanism to reward neutral and disinterested editing, and now Wikipedia is the sixth most visited site on the planet, the only reason for writing an article about a living person will be vanity or malice, tertium non datur.

It is another example of how no special theory is needed to explain Wikipedia.

See also

• Chapter 13
• Wikipedia through the Looking Glass
• Chapter 15