Bad Press Weekend for Wikipedia

David Card | December 05, 2005, 04:16 PM

Wikipedia may lack many things -- an army of paid fact-checkers, professional editors -- but it's got ethos to spare. One thing our own ethos of blogging doesn't allow for is for me to correct a colleague's typo. Oh well, you get what you pay for. Everybody can use professional editors.

I'm eager to see how the wisdom of Wikipedia's crowds can come up with a working solution to bad postings, maliciously intended or otherwise. Losing anonymity would be a shame, and I doubt an eBay rating scheme by itself will do the trick. Larry Lessig's "sue the bastards" approach seems a bit unwieldy, as well.

Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford and an expert in the laws of cyberspace, said that contrary to popular belief, true defamation was easily pursued through the courts because almost everything on the Internet was traceable and subpoenas were not that hard to obtain. (For real anonymity, he advised, use a pay phone.)

"People will be defamed," he said. "But that's the way free speech is. Think about the gossip world. It spreads. There's no way to correct it, period. Wikipedia is not immune from that kind of maliciousness, but it is, relative to other features of life, more easily corrected."