An eerily prescient Internet post that preceded the discovery of Chris Benoit's death and that of his wife and son put the spotlight Friday on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and its growing influence as a source of news.
The popular site found itself at the centre of the disturbing murder-suicide case Friday, when U.S. authorities announced they were investigating an addition made to Mr. Benoit's Wikipedia profile early Monday.
The unsourced entry stated that the Canadian wrestler missed a match Saturday night due to “the death of his wife Nancy.” That was nearly 14 hours before authorities discovered the bodies of Mr. Benoit, his wife and their seven-year-old son.
The post was explained as mere mischief in a confession that appeared on a Wikipedia discussion site Friday, but nevertheless highlighted the power of the masses to share news through the Internet nearly as rapidly as it transpires.
Sue Gardner, a consultant and special adviser to the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit group that runs Wikipedia, noted that the encyclopedia is meant to be an aggregator of news rather than a news outlet, since all articles must be credited to an external, published report.
But she nevertheless identified the site as being capable of following current events like few news organizations can, by relying on a vast global network of volunteer editors and contributors to pull disparate reports together.
Ms. Gardner, who previously worked as a journalist in Canada for 10 years, recalled turning to Wikinews to keep abreast of developments in the Virginia Tech shooting on April 16 while working for cbc.ca.
“It actually was the first place that I went online because I knew that Wikinews, in effect, aggregates together multiple sources,” says Ms. Gardner, who began working at the Florida-based Wikimedia Foundation on Monday.
While Wikipedia has suffered its fair share of credibility problems, Ms. Gardner says users have proven to be adequate watchdogs in keeping entries fair and accurate.
“The community has got a really strong understanding of its own rules and why it does things,” she says, noting that a shared commitment to neutrality guides more than 75,000 active contributors working on some 5,300,000 articles. “They're committed people who are pretty steeped in it.”
Still, the site weathers a considerable amount of vandalism.
Earlier this year, a prominent contributor who claimed to be a tenured professor of religion was revealed to be a 24-year-old college student in Kentucky, prompting Wikipedia to demand proof of qualifications from users claiming to be experts.
In December 2005, Wikipedia began requiring visitors to register before creating new entries after an article falsely implicated a U.S. journalist in the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby Kennedy.
Ms. Gardner says that as Wikipedia's user base grows, so too does the site's reliability and accuracy.
“There's obviously still opportunity for vandalism, vandalism happens all the time but it gets reverted pretty quickly and I would say that the bulk of the articles would be more acceptable,” she says, describing Wikipedia as “the living embodiment of the wisdom of crowds.”
In the case of Mr. Benoit, users removed the reference to his wife's death 47 minutes after it appeared, said Ms. Gardner. That led to a brief online battle between two camps in which the entry was restored and then removed, until administrators locked the site. The Benoit page remains locked until July 8.
An anonymous user said Friday on the Wikipedia discussion page that they had posted the entry based on rumours and speculation.
“I just can't believe what I wrote was actually the case,” wrote the user, who had the same IP address as the person who made the edits. “I've remained stunned and saddened over it.”
Paul Sullivan, who runs the citizen journalism site Orato.com, says the incident highlights the growing need for sophisticated levels of media literacy among the general public.
“We're always going to trade in error and we have to be careful,” Mr. Sullivan says. “It doesn't matter what the medium is, although this one has special challenges.”
