Wikipedia prankster confesses

It started as a joke and ended up as a shot heard round the Internet, with the joker quitting his job and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, suffering a blow to its credibility.

A man in Nashville, Tenn., has admitted that, in trying to shock a colleague with a joke, he put false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville.

Brian Chase, 38, who until Friday was an operations manager at a small delivery company, told Seigenthaler he had written the material suggesting Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.

Seigenthaler discovered the false entry only recently and wrote about it in an op-ed article in USA Today, saying he was especially annoyed that he could not track down the perpetrator because of Internet privacy laws.

His plight touched off a debate about the reliability of information on Wikipedia — and by extension the Internet — and the difficulty in holding Web sites and their users accountable, even when someone is defamed.

In a letter to Seigenthaler, Chase said he thought that Wikipedia was a "gag" Web site and that he had written the assassination tale to shock a co-worker, who knew of the Seigenthaler family and its illustrious history in Nashville.

"It had the intended effect," Chase said of his prank in an interview. But Chase said that once he became aware through news accounts of the damage he had done to Seigenthaler, he was remorseful and scared of what might happen to him.

Chase also found that he was slowly being cornered in cyberspace, thanks to the sleuthing efforts of Daniel Brandt, 57, of San Antonio, Texas, who makes his living as a book indexer. Brandt has been a frequent critic of Wikipedia and started an anti-Wikipedia Web site in September after reading what he said was a false entry about himself.

Using information in Seigenthaler's article and some online tools, Brandt traced the computer used to make the Wikipedia entry to the delivery company in Nashville. Brandt called the company and told employees about the Wikipedia problem but was not able to learn anything.

Brandt then sent an e-mail message to the company, asking for information about its courier services. A response bore the same Internet Protocol address that was left by the creator of the Wikipedia entry, offering further evidence of a connection.

A call by a reporter to the delivery company Thursday made employees nervous, they later told Seigenthaler. On Friday, Chase hand-delivered a letter to Seigenthaler's office, confessing what he had done, and they talked at length.

Wikipedia, a nonprofit venture that is the world's biggest encyclopedia, is written and edited by thousands of volunteers, and mistakes are expected to be caught by users.

Chase wrote: "I am truly sorry to have offended you, sir. Whatever fame comes to me from this will be ill-gotten indeed."

Seigenthaler said he "was not after a pound of flesh" and would not take Chase to court.

Chase resigned because, he said, he did not want to cause problems for his company. Seigenthaler urged Chase's boss to rehire him, but Chase said this had not happened.

Seigenthaler, founder of the First Amendment Center, said that as a longtime advocate of free speech, he found it awkward to be tracking down someone who had exercised that right. "I still believe in free expression," he said. "What I want is accountability."