Wikipedia Seigenthaler biography incident cause hoax
In May 2005, an unregistered editor posted a hoax article onto Wikipedia about journalist John Seigenthaler. The article falsely stated that Seigenthaler had been a suspect in the assassinations of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. 
After the hoax was discovered and corrected later in September, Seigenthaler, a friend and aide to Robert Kennedy, wrote in USA Today that the article was "Internet character assassination".The incident raised questions about the reliability of Wikipedia and other websites with user-generated content that lack the legal accountability of traditional newspapers and published materials. In a December 13, 2005, interview, co-founder Jimmy Wales expressed his support for Wikipedia policy allowing articles to be edited by unregistered users, but announced plans to roll back their article creation privileges as part of a vandalism-control strategy. The incident ultimately led Wikipedia to introduce stricter referencing requirements for biographies of living people.Hoax
On May 26, 2005, a biographical article about John Seigenthaler was created by an anonymous Wikipedia editor that contained, in its entirety, the following text:
John Seigenthaler was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the ealry [sic] 1960's. [sic]  For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assasinations [sic] of both John, and his brother, Bobby.  Nothing was ever proven.  
John Seigenthaler moved to the Soviet Union in 1971, and returned to the United States in 1984.  
He started one of the country's largest public relations firm [sic] shortly thereafter.Anonymous editor identified
On November 29, 2005, Seigenthaler described the incident in an op-ed in USA Today, of which he had been the founding editorial director. In the article, he included a verbatim reposting of the false statements and called Wikipedia a "flawed and irresponsible research tool".An expanded version was published several days later in The Tennessean, a daily newspaper in Nashville, Tennessee, where Seigenthaler had served in various capacities from beat reporter to chairman. In the article, Seigenthaler detailed his failed attempts to identify the anonymous person who posted the inaccurate biography. He reported that he had asked the poster's Internet service provider, BellSouth, to identify its user from the user's IP address. BellSouth refused to identify the user without a court order, suggesting that Seigenthaler file a John Doe lawsuit against the user, which Seigenthaler declined to do.Daniel Brandt, a San Antonio activist who had started the anti-Wikipedia site Wikipedia Watch in response to objections he had to the article about him, looked up the IP address in Seigenthaler's article. He found that it related to Rush Delivery, a delivery service company in Nashville. He contacted Seigenthaler and the media, and posted this information on his website.On December 9, Brian Chase, an operations manager of Rush Delivery, admitted that he had posted the false biography because he believed Wikipedia to be "some sort of joke website". After confessing, Chase was fired from Rush Delivery. He presented a letter of apology to Seigenthaler, who successfully interceded with Rush Delivery to reinstate Chase. Seigenthaler confirmed that he would not file a lawsuit in relation to the incident. He said that he was concerned that "every biography on Wikipedia is going to be hit by this stuff—think what they'd do to Tom DeLay and Hillary Clinton, to mention two. My fear is that we're going to get government regulation of the Internet as a result."Can I just say where I'm worried about this leading. Next year we go into an election year. Every politician is going to find himself or herself subjected to the same sort of outrageous commentary that hit me, and hits others. I'm afraid we're going to get regulated media as a result of that. And I tell you, I think if you can't fix it, both fix the history as well as the biography pages, I think it's going to be in real trouble, and we're going to have to be fighting to keep the government from regulating you.
In the December 6 joint NPR interview, Seigenthaler said that he did not want to have anything to do with Wikipedia because he disapproved of its basic assumptions. In an article Seigenthaler wrote for USA Today in late 2005, he said, "I am interested in letting many people know that Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool." He also pointed out that the false information had been online for over four months before he was aware of it, and that he had not been able to edit the article to correct it. After speaking with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, Seigenthaler said: "My 'biography' was posted May 26. On May 29, one of Wales' volunteers 'edited' it only by correcting the misspelling of the word 'early.' For four months, Wikipedia depicted me as a suspected assassin before I erased it from the website's history Oct. 5. The falsehoods remained on Answers.com and Reference.com for three more weeks." Editing Wikipedia, he suggested, would lend it his sanction or approval, and he stated his belief that editing the article was not enough and instead he wanted to expose "incurable flaws" in the Wikipedia process and ethos.
On December 9, Seigenthaler appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal with Brian Lamb hosting. He said he was concerned that other pranksters would try to spoof members of Congress or other powerful figures in government, which may then prompt a backlash and turn back First Amendment rights on the Web.
In the June 2007 issue of Reason magazine, Seigenthaler also expressed concern about the lack of transparency underlined by Wales' removal of the hoax pages from the article's history page. He also stated that many of the comments left by users in the edit summaries were things he would not want his nine-year-old grandson to see.
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