Contrary to my earlier suspicions, it seems that John Seigenthaler did indeed change the article about himelf. I still wonder, though, how long he waited before doing so. Did the four months he mentions pass prior to his discovery of the misinformation, or did he sit on his hands for a while?

A recent CNET article brings another interesting point to light.

"Wales said the Seigenthaler article not only escaped the notice of this corps of watchdogs, but it also became a kind of needle in a haystack: The page remained unchanged for so long because it wasn’t linked to from any other Wikipedia articles, depriving it of traffic that might have led to closer scrutiny."

There are two very important bits of information in that paragraph.

1. No other articles linked to the Seigenthaler article. 2. The Seigenthaler article received little traffic.

In other words, it’s likely that very few people ever would have seen the article had Seigethaler not drawn attention to it, and it would have posed little danger to his reputation. I’m not saying he was wrong to draw attention to it. I’m only pointing out that he probably overstated the danger the article posed. Some might argue that it was caught just in time; if it had been linked to from other articles, the gossip would spread like a disease throughout Wikipedia and beyond. However, I think that if the article started getting significant traffic and was being cited elsewhere, one or more voices of reason would have appeared and corrected the article. Thus, the misinformation would not have lasted long. Anyone who would have used the bad article as their sole source of information (and thus been unaffected by the corrections) is a sloppy researcher, an idiot, and/or a rumor-monger anyhow, so the point of fixing a single bad article quickly for their benefit is somewhat moot.

As a result of this and another kurfuffle, new articles can no longer be published anonymously. It’ll be interesting to see what, if any, affect this new rule has on Wikipedia’s quality and reputation.