Coke Ellington

Alabama Voices

Whenever I hear anyone attribute anything to Wikipedia, I cringe. If the speaker is someone whose knowledge and judgment I respect, I try to cringe only inwardly. This column explains why.

John Seigenthaler is the main reason I hate Wikipedia.

Most people in modern America know that Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced online encyclopedia.

Seigenthaler spent 43 years as a newspaperman at the Nashville Tennessean before spending 10 years as founding editorial director of USA Today. During the John F. Kennedy presidential administration in the early 1960s, he served as Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s administrative assistant.

The bus-integrating civil rights activists known as Freedom Riders arrived in Montgomery on May 20, 1961, and Seigenthaler was knocked unconscious with a pipe and kicked by the mob after he tried to protect one of the riders. He was taken to a nearby hospital.

Wikipedia itself tells about the “Wikipedia Seigenthaler biography incident” in which a writer in May 2005 alleged that Seigenthaler was a suspect in the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy.

Seigenthaler learned about the allegations that September. In December, Brian Chase admitted he had put the erroneous biography on Wikipedia because he thought it was “some sort of joke Web site.” Chase gave Seigenthaler a hand-written apology and Seigenthaler decided not to file a libel suit.

Seigenthaler founded the First Amendment Center in 1991. He and Ken Paulson, who directed the center from 1997 to 2004, used to put on an entertaining and informative program on the First Amendment.

After seeing the program in 2000, I immediately invited them to put on the program at Alabama State University. When they appeared at ASU in 2001, Seigenthaler said it was his first visit since his injuries in 1961.

Paulson is now dean of Middle Tennessee State University’s College of Mass Communication. Seigenthaler died in 2014. His biography on an MTSU website concludes:

“A strong advocate of First Amendment rights of free expression, he was also a nationally recognized critic of willfully false and misleading online vandalism. His controversy with Wikipedia for posting anonymous, libelous statements led to that website revising its policies.”

When Terry Manning, now at Savannah State University, was multimedia editor of the Advertiser, sometimes he spoke to an ASU class or to a high school journalism workshop on the campus. He always told the students to go ahead and look up whatever they wanted to on Wikipedia, but then to look at its sources and make sure they were valid.

If you think the Seigenthaler fiasco was a one-time blooper, you might be surprised if you do a keyword search for “The 10 biggest hoaxes in Wikipedia’s first 10 years” or “The 15 Biggest Wikipedia Blunders.”

A longtime newspaperman, Coke Ellington worked for the Montgomery Advertiser from 1984 to 1997. He taught in the Alabama State University communications department from 1997 to 2014.