In 1992, noted American essayist Gore Vidal published a now forgotten bit of cheerfully wicked blasphemy titled “Live from Golgotha.” The novel’s plot involves a malevolent computer hacker who is erasing all existing records of the Christian Sacred Story. However offensive you might find Vidal’s satire, there’s little arguing with his prescient take on the current reliability of electronically stored “factual” data. (Remember, Vidal wrote this way back in 1992, when we were just learning about a vague, oncoming “Information Superhighway,” the Web as We Currently Know It had yet to be experienced by national eyeballs, and things like blogs and social networks weren’t objects of even our wildest imaginings.) Fast-forward to the present day, and think about just how much unreliable information zips across the Internet any given nanosecond—most of it posted by nameless and faceless Web users with little regard for things like common decency, morality or even factual accountability.

Letting Web users upload their content will always remain a risky proposition in a free society. Offensive language, lewd materials, hate speech and otherwise snarky comments have a way of proliferating on user-generated sites despite the best efforts of Web site monitors and censors alike. While inappropriate rants, raves and rumor mongering are to be expected on things like email spam, gossip blogs, political blogs and even open social networks, they grow more perilous when directly impacting so-called factual Web content providers.

What separates fact from fiction on the Web is increasingly hard to discern, when even “trusted” news sources like CNN (whose business model is driven by late-breaking stories) sometimes fall prey to breathless and unsubstantiated headlines on popular “alternative” news sites like The Drudge Report, then re-post these stories on their own trusted sites and even broadcast them on TV. The moment these journalistic red herrings are caught, and they frequently are by self-policing news editors and alert readers alike, they’re quickly redacted and replaced by other headlines in the hopes most folks won’t notice.

You may dismiss these informational “dead ends” as the inevitable byproduct of the Web-driven 24/7 news cycle (and even free speech). But they pose a truly destructive threat to other trusted sources of information on the Web, specifically Wikipedia, which is entirely dependent on users for collaborative content generation and editorial oversight. By now, you may have seen reports of frustrated university professors and high school teachers across the country decrying the lack of accuracy and glaring factual omissions of many entries on the increasingly popular online encyclopedia. But before you shake your head in quiet lament for the declining state of higher education, consider how such popular yet unreliable sources of information can affect us all—regardless of education level.

In an emotional and financially charged political race such as the one we Americans currently face, information is currency. And political information is now most commonly obtained online. This fact does not go unnoticed by Republicans, who’ve made bold creative forays into the online informational space, most specifically on Wikipedia itself. As Gawker originally reported on Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia Whitewash, just prior to the campaign’s announcement of her selection as the VP candidate, “someone” made more than 30 favorable changes to her Wikipedia page (including editing down details of her beauty pageant past and of investigations into her alleged firing of Alaska’s Saftey Director for initially refusing to fire her former brother-in-law from his state trooper post).

Alas, the anonymous edits did little to cover up these uncomfortable items from Governor Palin’s past (the nation’s voracious media machine too vast and gossip-hungry to hold back with a mere Wikipedia entry). But the attempt at downplaying or even removing specific facts from Palin’s online biography illustrates the greater perils of our increased reliance on user-generated content on the Web. This is of particular concern when it’s common knowledge that students aren’t the only ones using Wikipedia as a primary source of factual information. As noted by the American Journalism Review, it’s the first stop for many journalists as well. Scary.

While Wikipedia’s creators and supporters will be quick to tell you that its very own system of user generation facilitates the self-correction and/or deletion of factual inaccuracies (as well as the removal of inappropriate content), it doesn’t take a genius to figure that even the most dedicated Wikipedians (as its contributors are known) cannot possibly monitor ALL entries, ALL the time, for accuracy. Never mind the fact that no single Wikipedian can remotely be considered an authority on even a sizeable fraction of the more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 250 languages the site claims to host.

In the end, much like in Gore Vidal’s satirical dystopia, the last person posting on a particular subject will always be the Final Authority. That’s simply not reliable. Not reliable at all.

Javier San Miguel, Associate Creative Director, Senior Web Copywriter

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