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Your Right to Be an Idiot


By Tony Long | Also by this reporter

Let's get something straight from the get-go. The First Amendment is sacrosanct. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of thought, the whole ball of wax -- it's the DNA of the United States, the stuff America is made of. You don't mess with it, ever. Without it, we're North Korea with a few shopping malls.

No lying, fear-mongering administration, no sanctimonious red-state senator, no judge with an ax to grind has the right to screw around with it. Even those of you far to the right of sanity must see the wisdom in that. Remember those guys with the powdered wigs and the tight breeches and the bad teeth? Jefferson and Hamilton and that mob? Those were your guys, once. For the sake of what follows, let's pretend the First Amendment still matters, even to you.
So, what to do with Wikipedia? And, in a broader sense, what to do with the free flow of information on the internet?
In a word, nothing.

Having access to the internet is a little like handing a kid a loaded gun. In the wrong hands it can be intellectually lethal. In terms of being a reliable source, the web is a minefield to be navigated very carefully. There is plenty of useful information to be had, but the place is a nest of vipers, too.

Wait a minute, sez you. Don't blame the internet. What about books? Books can be full of lies, too. They sure can. Lying has been around since man first 1.) evolved the ability to speak or 2.) got his sorry ass tossed out of the Garden of Eden. But the internet, with its instant access to vast amounts of information from an endless number of sources, is very different from anything that has come before.

Still, do you regulate the internet to "protect" us from ingesting information that is wrong, deliberately misleading, whacked out, even harmful? Uh-uh. That's your own responsibility, as an educated participant in a free society. (The "educated" part is a bit tricky these days, I'll grant you, but that's fodder for another column.)

There's an old expression in the newspaper business: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." In other words, make sure your bullshit detector is always on. Be skeptical of what you're told, of what you read. Cross-check your facts with other sources. What applies in the newsroom applies tenfold on the internet, where anybody is free to post any damned thing they want to.
Which brings us to Wikipedia, the so-called citizens' encyclopedia.

Yeah, so some cretin thought he was being cute by posting a false biography of John Siegenthaler Sr., a distinguished journalist who once served as an administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, linking him to the assassinations of both Kennedy brothers. In copping to the deed, the guy said he didn't realize Wikipedia is considered, in the online world at least, to be a legitimate information resource. It was a joke, he said.

Siegenthaler, not surprisingly, hit the roof. (Especially since the bogus bio languished on the site for four months, despite his efforts to get it removed.) He lambasted Wikipedia's credibility in an op-ed piece but, to his credit, never suggested that slapping tighter controls on the internet is the answer to this kind of idiocy.
He didn't even indulge in the great American pastime, filing suit. Instead he chose to accept the guy's apology. But Siegenthaler, the former publisher of The Tennessean who founded The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, understands the absolutely critical need to protect the right of free speech, especially in the current frenzied political climate.
While the founders couldn't have anticipated the internet, their imperative still stands. Freedom of speech trumps everything in a free society. (As long as nobody gets killed, which is why you can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater.) It has to. Without it, a society is no longer free. That's why the Nazis get to march through Skokie, Illinois, and why Rush Limbaugh gets to have a radio show. It's revolting sometimes, but to deny a single individual the right to free expression is to begin sliding down that slippery slope toward authoritarianism. The dulcet drone of Limbaugh's boorishness is the price you pay to breathe free.

The problem with a site like Wikipedia, of course, is that there is no responsible vetting process, no professional editors or fact-checkers on staff to verify accuracy. Wikipedia relies on you, the general public (or Wikipedians, in their argot), to fulfill that role and -- generally speaking and meaning no disrespect -- you're not qualified to do it. But you come at the right price (free), which keeps costs down. And Wikipedia argues, with some justification, that a factual error can be caught and fixed just as easily by an interested professor or a knowledgeable amateur as it can by an editor.
The trap is that nothing is vetted beforehand. Mistakes, deliberate or not, can only be caught after posting. Wikipedia presumes a kind of communal sense of responsibility, a belief that, given the opportunity, most people will be honest. As Hemingway once wrote in another context, "Isn't it pretty to think so?" The reality is that blind trust is something of a gamble. But in the wide-open world bequeathed to us by the internet, and in a free society generally, it's a gamble we have to be willing to take.
The alternative is too depressing to contemplate.

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Tony Long, copy chief at Wired News, spent many years in the newspaper business. "You meet the most interesting people there," he says.