Blogging, Wikipedia and accuracy

Anyone who believes everything in a blog to be the gospel truth, is an idiot. Any blog, including this one is totally opinion.

Anyone who reads anything in Wikipedia and then believes it is totally true, is an idiot. In the preamble to all Wikipedia contributors it is clearly written out that it is meant to be a compendium of knowledge written by faceless contributors wishing to contribute. Initially all contributions are subject to further scrutiny and subject to later examination. All contributors are responsible for that data not the Wikipedia.

I am a contributor to Wikipedia.

On the topic of : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Dumont

Further discussion was encouraged. Fortunately some of that discussion was from a personal viewpoint but such a contribution bolsters the world knowledge. I may have been wrong but this was definitely opinion and written as such.

This was my contribution to world knowledge, it was to convey my deceased father's viewpoint who had been born only a couple of decades after that conflict and knew many of the people who had physically witnessed the relevant events.

The op-ed piece was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gabriel_Dumont

Another was on page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:North-West_Rebellion

Guess which one is my contribution.

Now for a jokes media types such as Don Landry of the Fan590 of Toronto decided to furnish false information into the Wikipedia on a topic relating to his more famous morning radio partner Gord Stellick. I forgot what Landry wrote. He thought it was funny. I believe he usually thinks anything he does is hilarious. But he lacks the brainpower to take on people like Sam Mitchell effectively mano en mano, as his usual Wednesday morning interviews with Sam Mitchell have proven.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gord_Stellick

You will note that as a repercussion of Landry's actions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_McCown

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Howarth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Swirsky

The Stellick entry has been corrected. As a result Landry, remains the only senior radio personality on the radio station who appears to be delisted on the Wikipedia. For any media savvy person with the hope of having any sort of future career an entry in Wikipedia maintains to a new modern de rigueur.

Such an open process can be subject to significant abuse. Of that is no doubt.

The scary thing remains that this misunderstanding will be maintained by those now wishing to shut down the process of the accumulation of knowledge. People are now suing such media as responsible for that which is published regardless of the long term convention that contributors are responsible for the data input.

To date the Canadian Supreme Court has supported this open process in such actions regarding the American interpretation of copyright legislation being applied in Canada. And so goes the course of justice. The problem with Common Law is that there is a belief amongst civil lawyers that it can be stretched. It can be.

Sites such as those being sued, have been used as a weapon of malice. According to reports to date, I believe a rather inept Green Party of Canada membership tried to splay some misinformation about a former officer of the party. It is a case before the courts. The plaintiff is trying to sue the site owners of such information. It will be interesting to see the effect of these legal shenanigans. The plaintiff has been able through litigious ambition to thwart the web sites in Canada and the United States. To date this has worked only because the defendants believed that surrender was the cheapest not the ethical response.

However the litigators largest problem will be to prove financial harm by these actions. From what I've seen is that the plaintiffs have not suffered any financial harm directly due to any information, or misinformation placed on the web.

Between Canada and the United States libel and slander legislation is a wholly different process. Lawyers are not always up front at the best of times. And this litigator appears to be dallying on down the rosy path laid out by his lawyers or lawyers who only tells him what he wants to hear.

Few actions of libel and slander in Canada have been successful. It is not a high percentage winner. And any litigation involves a double edge sword. If the defense capably defends itself all that information will be published and at a higher profile. Further the Canadian system of libel legislation follows the British model and not the American.

Significant harm must be proved in the British model. As a result winning may not be something to cheer. I recall that one libel award in the past as $1.00.

The problem is that most of the defendants have chosen to settle out of court. In the case of smaller site operators settling out of court takes on a significant onerous load. However taking on a site operator such as Google, the plaintiff should back off. Winning will not be all that easy.

All they have to prove is that that there is a foundation of truth within the alleged statements of slander or libel then the plaintiff's case is lost. If the court correctly believes that the blogging forum is opinion demonstrating facts that a blog constitutes a belief and not journalistic fact then the plaintiff's case becomes lost.

It seems a trivial but any op-ed writer knows that if a conjecture is prefaced by the phrase "I believe that..." the subsequent facts can be interpreted as a truth albeit false. The plaintiff is then required to shake that belief and place before the court a high level of proof that the defendant intentionally committed that statement knowing that it was false. It is a case of spreading a false truth.

For a person of journalistic background a court would find that there is a higher level of responsibility of getting the story right. However, and this is the problem with blogging, if the writer is enterring a belief in a blog then that blog is legally a truth despite being false. The vast majority of bloggers are amateur to the written process. Courts, especially civil courts apply a vastly different amount of mitigation to each type of writer.

A professionally paid writer has a vested interest in maintaining written accuracy. An amateur writer possesses no commercial advantage to whatever they wrote and the degree of truthfulness is much broader. As long as the writer truly believes that what they are writing is true beyond malice, that belief is total truth no matter how false it is.

British Law applied to Libel is a larger whole to fill and as long as the writer truly believes about the truthfulness of the statement then it cannot be libel. Remember libel and slander is only libel and slander if the teller knowingly made those statements knowing them to be false or without truthful foundation. The writer must be given adequate time to be contrite to revise, publish a retraction in the same media and/or apologize in a reasonable time.

If your eyes are crossing in that confusion, don't worry you are not alone. Google is only a search engine for data. The data doesn't have to be true.

Wikipedia publically states, from the outset, that the information may not be necessarily accurate. They do try however to make it as accurate as possible given the fact that it is constantly being bombarded by information.

And blogging is statement of opinions, not to be consider gospel truth. And opinions are beliefs not necessarily true facts. To the author - a truth. The site operator is not responsible for those beliefs.

You will note that I do not directly give you the litigants name until the court case is settled. Why am I writing this is that Canadian businessmen are employing malicious litigation to deter the truth about their business practice. They know that the lawsuit is frivolous.

Court action will prove that there is no adequate legislation regarding libel or slander in the internet world. Court action will prove that.

In final summation it should be put forward that Blogs, Wikipedia must be always construed as being an uncertified source of information. I use Wikipedia citations as the starting point to research not the final result in such material that needs a certification. Ninety nine percent of the material that flows into Wikipedia daily is accurate or accurate enough that a certain reliability of the truth can be ascertained. For almost everything it is a starting point, not an ending point of research and not the final word.