The wiki principle

Apr 20th 2006
From The Economist print edition

Are many minds better than a few?

WHEN people express scepticism about participatory media, they usually have people like Brian Chase in mind. Mr Chase is a 38-year-old from Nashville, Tennessee, who until recently worked in the middle-management layers of a courier firm called Rush Delivery and seemed destined to remain entirely unremarkable. For reasons known only to himself, however, Mr Chase last May decided to play a joke, “a joke that went horribly, horribly wrong”, as he would later tell his local newspaper, the Tennessean.

His joke consisted of a hoax entry on Wikipedia.org, a free online encyclopedia that anybody—anybody at all—can edit, simply by clicking on a button that says “edit this page”. Mr Chase posted a biographical article on John Seigenthaler, a distinguished journalist (and former editor of the Tennessean) who in 1961 did a stint as assistant to Robert Kennedy, America's attorney-general at the time. Mr Chase, however, fabricated an entirely different life for Mr Seigenthaler, one that had him living in the Soviet Union, founding a public-relations firm and, most perniciously, suggested that he was implicated in the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy.