By RegoPark
Contributing Writer

Another chapter on the story of Internet accountability has been played out on an entry of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, where up to now you and I could edit entries on anyone, anything, anyhow. Apparently someone has posted a fake bio, allegedly as a prank, on a Nashville journalist with details of how he supposedly knew and was connected to the assassinations of JFK and RFK.

“My fear is that we’re going to get government regulation of the Internet as a result,” hoax victim John Siegenthaler told USA Today.

I wish I had more time today to go into this issue, so I’ll have to leave this as it is. But I question whether the real Achilles heel in online information sites is the potential for malicious hoaxes or pranks gone too far. Truth is complicated, and news consumers tend to prefer hard, tangible facts or the appearance thereof. And a decade after most of you readers out there have been online, we’re still weaning ourselves from the paradigm that all online news is accurate online news.

If you take Matt Drudge’s own Wiki entry, for example, you don’t get so much of a taste of his modus operandi — particularly his own concerns and championship of freedom of the Internet from government regulation — as you get over the controversy over whether he had gay relationships. (You’ll find a long debate raging on the page’s edit board over this.) I have no problem over the inclusion of the gay rumors, but hearsay and speculation needs more context than it is given. I don’t consider it appropriate, for example, that his supposed former “boyfriend” is listed under his relationships along with the name of his father.

I actually did correct one bit of mistaken info on the page (the name of the high school from which he ultimately graduated), but that’s for another day…

Back to work…