Wikipedia slander?

John Seigenthaler, former administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, has a bone to pick with Wikipedia.

In an op-ed in USAToday Seigenthaler takes the community-authored encyclopedia to task for running a biography of him that falsely accused him of being a suspect in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.

The charges remained up on the site for months before Seigenthaler got them removed. The claims were posted anonymously on the encyclopedia, and while he was able to trace the author's IP address to a customer of BellSouth Internet, the company said it would not disclose the name without a subpoena, Seigenthaler wrote.

"And so we live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research--but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects," he wrote in the essay. "Congress has enabled them and protects them."

Blog community response:

"This kind of stuff is just funny these days...actually, it's the people who actually think that wikipedia is a viable source of reference that is funny."
--A Day in Paradise

"I've long been an advocate for being very cautious about taking the information in Wikipedia at face value. Much of what I see there is quite good, at least so far as I can judge; but where my knowledge has gaps, I can't really know the quality of the information, and since it's anonymously-written, there's no way to judge anyone's credentials, or if they even have any. Since people generally use any reference source to look up things they don't know, that lack of accountability is a problem."
--yahsuretaobetcha!

"Wikipedia is a lot of fun to read, but it isn't the last word or even the first word on anything and isn't a substitute for real, peer-reviewed research."
--Random Thoughts

"Yes, Wikipedia can be abused. But once something gets in the mainstream media, like the de-contextualized Dean scream, and you can forget about ever making it right. Why is the burden of proof suddenly on Wikipedia and not equally on USAToday? Because USAToday is a profit center, that's why."
--The Agonist