The author Philip Roth found a serious error in a Wikipedia entry about his book, “The Human Stain”. Unable to get it corrected, he openly published a letter to them via the New Yorker:
I am Philip Roth. I had reason recently to read for the first time the Wikipedia entry discussing my novel “The Human Stain.” The entry contains a serious misstatement that I would like to ask to have removed. This item entered Wikipedia not from the world of truthfulness but from the babble of literary gossip—there is no truth in it at all.
It seemed when Roth tried to contact them about the error thru the usual channels, the “English Wikipedia Administrator” had responded with this:
“I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work…but we require secondary sources.”
– excerpted from An Open Letter To Wikipedia, New Yorker magazine, 9/7/2012
View From the Ledge 
Leave a comment
Comments feed for this article