The vandalism incident on WikiPedia that slandered John Seigenthaler was just that...malicious vandalism. There are those who would say that such activity completely negates the open encyclopedia technology that runs the WikiPedia data/information collection system...after all, just about anyone may add or alter the content. There are others who use the incident to promote the concept of a digital signature identifier, which essentially would eliminate annonymous posting. It is interesting discussion. I doubt that the first ammendment writers could have anticipated the enormous power (and freedom) of electronic publishing and wonder if a deeper level of accountability would have been included had their been a window through which they could have seen the future. I hestitate to propose any 'trimmimg of the fat' from the constitution, but would prefer a grassrooots-driven emphasis on ethics in technology. Which leads me to the folowing Sun Washington Bureau article by Evan Lehmann and re-printed on the lowellsun.com (MA) site:
The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat on a Web site that bills itself as the "world's largest encyclopedia."The Meehan alterations on Wikipedia.com represent just two of more than 1,000 changes made by congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month. Wikipedia is a global reference that relies on its Internet users to add credible information to entries on millions of topics.
In November and December, The Sun learned, users of the House's IP address were temporarily blocked from changing content because of violations described by the site as a "deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia."
So, in this era of volunteer (or citizen) journailsts, who is to say that only historians have the right or the sole authority to write history? Where are the battle lines being drawn in terms of the histories of today's political landscape? Do we really want that record to be written by those whose vested interests include a perpetual state of re-election campaigns? Is there hope for anything that resembles balance, non-biased, and ethical recording of our country's leadership in a historical context? Or, are we doomed to a virtual text history that will be filled with land mines of constantly changing, distorted spin? In retrospect, how much of our recorded (written) history do we scrutinize with the same fervor? Are we seeing what happens when those whose histories have been distorted now have the available means to fight back before innuendo and spin become something that looks like fact?