OfficialWire: Rectify the article?

Tuesday, December 13th, 2005

I e-mailed the following to OfficialWire to see if they hold themselves accountable for faulty news reporting:

In your news story titled ‘It’s Your Story…You Tell It Anyway
You Want On Wikipedia’ the following claim is made:

“After four months, Seigenthaler was finally able to get Wales
to remove the offending piece from Wikipedia and from the other
online ‘resources’ that simply copy from Wales’ pool of data”

However, there is no indication in the original article written
by Mr. Siegenthaler (titled: ‘Truth can be at risk in the world
of the Web’) that this was the case. In his article, he writes:

“The ‘biography’ was posted at 2:29 p. m. May 26. On May 29, one
of Wales volunteers, identified only as SNlyer12 ‘edited’ what
had been written about me only by correcting the misspelling of
the word ‘early.’ For four months, Wikipedia continued to
present me as a suspected assassin and a 13-year resident of a
Communist regime.”

This paragraph seems to be the source for your claim. However,
he does not claim it took four months to remove the information
after he contacted Wikipedia or even found the article. He
claimed the information had been on there for four months total,
not four months after he contacted Wikipedia. There is no
indication in Mr. Siegenthaler’s article of when he first
visited and/or contacted Wikipedia.

I could have missed something in the original article, or
perhaps you’ve contacted Mr. Siegenthaler himself and got the
information for your claim via that route. In any case, please
re-check the claim and verify it’s accuracy.

In the case that the claim is found to be wrong, what actions
will be taken by your organisation to correct it?

I wonder how they’ll respond.