Rewriting history? The risks of open and accessible information.

in Today's New York Times, Katharine Q. Seelye addresses some of the problems posed by the open participatory encyclopedia Wikipedia.

"According to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia," writes Seelye "John Seigenthaler Sr. is 78 years old and the former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville. But is that information, or anything else in Mr. Seigenthaler's biography, true? The question arises because Mr. Seigenthaler recently read about himself on Wikipedia and was shocked to learn that he "was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby." "Nothing was ever proven," the biography added." [...]

"Indeed, Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0 and a longtime Internet analyst, said Wikipedia may be better than real life. "The Internet has done a lot more for truth by making things easier to discuss," she said. "Transparency and sunlight are better than a single point of view that can't be questioned." For Mr. Seigenthaler, whose biography on Wikipedia has since been corrected, the lesson is simple: "We live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research, but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects."

Wikipedia.org may defame people, institutions and present issues from a biased viewpoint (I have experienced it myself when the Transnational Radical Party encountered some problems at the United Nations on the occasion of a presentation of a written statement concerning the Arab "minority" of the Ahwazi people, who live in the Iran's Southwestern provice of Kuzestan and that triggered the angered reaction of Teheran's Ambassador to the UN who was not pleased by the denounces at the center of the TRP's statement) but, once you know it, Wikipedia allows reactions, corrections and the opening of debates becoming a potent enabler of e-activism in favor of the affirmation of dissent and, at times, truth.