"I'm afraid we're going to get regulated media as a result of that. And I -- 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."
People can decide for themselves if they think that some "libel" (i.e. 'uncorrected cruft') in one article will equate to a wider climate of presumably dire and draconian "government" regulation. I think the claim is beyond ridiculous, and throwing Kelly's little laundry list of media errors into the equasion, Siegenthaler's comments are almost indistinguishable from an attack on *free media from the point of view of *corporate media.
No doubt he is sincere, but his interests *seem to be in protecting the institutional, and not the emergent. In that context, being diplomatic to Siegenthaler for
Well, I doubt that. His editorial shows that he was able to browse the revision history of his article and found out the user who inserted the incorrect statements. It shows that he has technical skills enough to use the Wikipedia interface and also knows what an "Internet Protocol address" is. Average 78 year old retired journalists doesn't understand stuff like that, Seigenthaler apparently does. That makes me wonder why he didn't correct the errors in his article himself? Maybe his editorial wouldn't have been published had it read "A Wikipedia entry about me as incorrect for 132 days, until I came by and fixed it. Wikipedia rocks!"?
Sorry for the speculation and conspiracy theorizing, but to me it seems that the purpose of his editorial was to raise hell. An example of a journalist not reporting news, but creating it himself.
In the real world, things like that are bound to happen. Name one organisation that hasn't been criticised as harshly as the current printed media attack on Wikipedia. The media makes their living on "scandals" like these. There is no reason to panic! Restricting page creation to only registered users in an attempt to remove possibly libellous statements from Wikipedia sounds like 100% pure and irrational panic to me. It also makes it seem like Wikipedia's rule makers are more concerned with what the media thinks than our own community thinks - since there is no way in hell such a proposal would have gotten a majority in democratically held vote.
-- mvh Björn