There is a 2008 comic book, Umbrella Academy, which contains a joke about the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy (JFK).In 2019 the comic became a video series and presented the Kennedy assassination joke again. I liked the comic and I recently watched the video series. The joke is incidental, but since the joke is part of my native Texas culture, I understand it and can explain it. Here is the joke and how it changed the course of Wikipedia history.
In summary, from the 1960s to present, many discussions make humor with conspiracy theories of assassination of JFK. The form of the humor is in tall tales, where anyone who wants to participate creates an outlandish and complicated explanations of who wanted JFK dead and why. In a typical story, some minor detail changes the course of history, like a butterfly effect in “A sound of Thunder“. Dozens of these stories are in popular circulation, and people from Texas like me have heard many of these stories throughout our lives and can easily recognize them as attempted humor. In 2005 some random person with an Internet connection posted a Kennedy conspiracy theory into the Wikipedia biography of journalist John Seigenthaler. Wikipedia had an excellent quality control process in place, and in less than a day, a reviewer removed the conspiracy theory and even drafted original biographical text of good quality in its place. Then and even now this is a commendable show of the highest quality web moderation as compared to any other online community. Still, somehow Seigenthaler became enraged and directed his anger at Wikipedia. His anger was ridiculous then, because he failed to recognize he cultural context of years of Kennedy assassination jokes, and also because this was an era when young people understood the concept of publishing text online but older people like Seigenthaler did not, and also because the Wikipedia community was confident in its quality control process because this was an occurrence where Wikipedia’s review was operating exceptionally well as compared to any competing media outlet. Seigenthaler had unusual access to media as a conventional journalist and drew as much mass media attention to his story as he could. While his complaint was silly, and while Wikipedia was in the more fortunate and favorable position in this conflict, the Wikipedia community treated his protest seriously. Everyone in wiki recognized that in general, we all want to have confidence in our moderation and to be able to give a clear explanation of our publishing commitment. The Wikipedia community’s own outcome was the creation of the Biographies of Living Persons Policy, in which the Wikipedia community committed to prioritize the review of content added to biographies of living people. The general rule in Wikipedia is that if someone adds content to a Wikipedia article, then that content should be a summary of an existing published reliable source which they cite. The biographies of living persons policy directs the Wikipedia community to quickly review all incoming edits to that class of articles, with the first and easiest quality check being to simply confirm that editors cite sources. The Wikipedia community has come to celebrate this policy. 15 years on, I wanted to tell the story around this policy again. The story at present is that American media still makes jokes about Kennedy’s assassination, as evidenced by the joke’s recurrence in this popular bigger budget superhero video series. I would not want anyone to forget that so much of the discussion about this policy came from the dramatic irony of a large number of people in Wikipedia witnessing Seigenthaler’s lack of awareness of the culture of tall tales around the Kennedy assassination, and that the Internet now permits anyone to post anything online, and that his complaint was showcasing the unparalleled strength of Wikipedia’s quality control rather than attacking any shortcoming.
Kennedy’s assassination and tall tales
In 1963 United States President John F. Kennedy got a bullet in his head while in a public motorcade in Dallas, Texas. He was in a moving car and a sniper shot him from far away while crowds watched. Of course everyone talked about the incident. Kennedy was a socially and politically disruptive president for many reasons, and in the conversation after his death, many people speculated on who might have wanted him dead and who would benefit from him being gone. The government captured the assassin, the mysterious Lee Harvey Oswald, who neglected to communicate any particular reason for killing the president. Within two days of Oswald’s capture, a mafia affiliate named Jack Ruby assassinated him, then Ruby proceeded to publicly and prominently tease claims that he had something important to say about some weird web of conspiracies. Jack Ruby died before being able to tell his story. The facts of this story are strange enough. Complicating all of this, in Texas there is a culture to promote conspiracy theories, which people take seriously, and to tell outlandish tall tales, which is a hobby many people take as part of the local culture. Sometimes the two mix, such as when someone communicates a conspiracy theory as a tall tale so that they can spread a rumor in a socially acceptable way. By mixing truth, fiction, and speculation, information spreads easily in Texas, and individual listeners can believe what they wish. The way that people play the game and tell the joke is to create an outlandish explanation for who killed Kennedy and what complicated chain of events utterly disrupts all of society to eventually trickle into some small benefit for some criminal mastermind who planned everything while being far removed from any direct action. When I was 18 years old in my first year of college I had a paper copy of the Warren Commission and saw pictures of “Bob” as graffiti in my community, and was enthusiastic to discuss JFK’s assassination and “Bob”‘s comparable assassination in the Dallas area where I lived, where Kennedy died, and which “Bob” designated as holy in the Church of the Subgenius.
Kennedy’s assassination in fiction
In the Umbrella Academy one of the heroes has an exciting life as a time traveling assassin for hire. Comic book characters somehow often are simultaneously heroes and commit mass murders, and in the universe of adventure fiction, somehow teams including the Marvel heroes, the DC heroes, or any number of other individuals or groups kill tens or hundreds or hundreds of thousands of people casually and with little consequence. Mass murders in comics are often background details for advancing the plot, which is typically interpersonal relationships. In the Umbrella Academy, the plot is that a group of siblings have difficult relationships with each other because of an unusual childhood. To express these family relationships, the comic book incidentally mentions that one of the children joined the interdimensional galaxy police and had to kill president Kennedy and bomb the Hindenburg.
Enough audiences find this funny that many media sources make light of this. I will not critique the humor of any this. I can see a future when new media has data about all past media, and when humanity will be able to count the number of times when anyone has told tall tales or made jokes about the Kennedy assassination. We are not there yet, but for the sake of this story, I confirm as a Texan that lots of people in Texas tell stories about Kennedy’s assassination, making a joke of it. The TV Tropes wiki has a compilation of media which presents JFK jokes, or if not jokes, whatever JFK’s assassination means now as a frame for storytelling.
Wikipedia’s Biographies of Living Persons Policy
Wikipedia’s Biographies of Living Person’s Policy is a masterwork of Wikipedia culture and ideology. To understand this policy is to understand multiple new and amazing social changes brought by the advent of Internet. The Wikipedia community recognized these changes and articulated their significance in this policy before anyone else knew what was happening.
The social context of this policy is that the world became different as the public gained access to options for publishing user generated content. Here are some of facts which people in the Wikipedia community knew in 2005 at the introduction of this policy, and which power brokers in media and the world in general did not know:
- People read content on the Internet
- Anyone can publish information online
- When someone publishes information online, other people can find and read that
- It is possible for an individual who has no particular access or money or power to be able to publish whatever they like, even without permission from a wealthy person or power broker
- There is not a boss of the Internet, or an obvious particular organization which has responsibility for everything published on in Internet accessible media
- Internet media is not a fad, and online media is growing in popularity
I am belaboring details about the Internet which are obvious now, and will be obvious for as long as humanity has the Internet as now as we believe will exist with humanity forever, but if Siegenthaler was like his contemporaries he would doubt, disbelieve, or dismiss all these ideas. These concepts were mostly unknown in 2005 and were still amazing revelations then. Back in 2005 most people would have either not believed or not understood the significance of these statements.
More specifically to Wikipedia and that BLP policy, here are some other facts which the Wikipedia community knew which others did not know:
- The Wikipedia community has superior insights into online media as compared to leaders in journalism, broadcasting, or traditional academic communication theory
- The Wikipedia community has a new media moderation system in place which works natively in a digital media environment, and which is superior in a digital environment as compared to any attempt to adapt non-digital moderation to virtual spaces
- Despite not having designated leadership or a public relations head, the Wikipedia community is able to coordinate communication effectively, and can, for example, respond effectively to mass-media criticism with the crowdsourced creation of a policy response
- In observing complaints from traditional media against Wikipedia, the Wikipedia community operates as a hive mind to develop a robust critical discourse. The Wikipedia community has high consciousness of its strengths and weaknesses, and for any given complaint, Wikipedia users can tap into published knowledge of exactly how what to say to answer criticism.
The Wikipedia community already was feeling its power then at the time when other traditional powerholders in media did not even imagine that a decline was in process.
From Seigenthaler’s perspective, and from the mass media coverage at the time, the old guard felt like they were criticizing Wikipedia, youth culture, the Internet in general, and encroachment of digital media talent upon their non-digital publishing professional skill sets. This was not the case then, and the Wikipedia community never felt like Seigenthaler had a reasonable complaint. When the Wikipedia community drafted this policy it was not even to change behavior, but rather, it was to put into words what everyone was already doing and which the new media generation understood without being told and due to their experience from the nature of the system.
One of the most encouraging aspects of the Seigenthaler complaint was that he was complaining about content which Wikipedia’s moderation system had detected and removed within 24 hours, which was better than what Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, or any of the other big players could do at that time. Part of the social context of this complaint about Wikipedia was that Wikipedia was a channel for community empowerment and nonprofit media, when actually all of the big players were experimenting with user generated content and all of them permitted similar user activity. The media conditions the public to tolerate bad behavior from the corporate sector, because they are supposed to be self-serving and profit seeking and problematic, but critical of nonprofit community projects with less resources, because those projects have a mission to seek goodness. The way things ought to be is that the public should set the ethics of public space, and when corporate entities seek to enter the public commons, then they have to comply with community norms. Too often the reality is that corporations do what they want and send blame downward to whomever is less privileged in society. I am not dismissing the Seigenthaler complaint, but I will note that lots of websites publish lots of nonsense, and that Wikipedia moderates that nonsense in a better, more quickly, more ethically, and with more criticism than other platforms with more billions of dollars.
About lies in Texas
I grew up in Texas which is the state where the assassination happened, and since part of Texas culture is sharing fake folklore, people there enjoy telling and listening to outlandish explanations for why things happened. Kennedy assassination stories can be a mix of somber regret, concerned citizens against government oppression, wild fiction for fun, or provocation by people in on the joke at the expense of people not in on the joke. In the future people will forget the historical context, but obviously the intent of saying that someone killed JFK is a joke. In the Seigenthaler vandalism, the outlandish accusation was that he was an assassin mastermind who killed both president Kennedy and also his brother Robert Kennedy in another conspiracy Other context which the future will forget is that in the early days of the Internet people were bewildered by online publishing in general, and understanding new media like user generated content or Wikipedia required multiple levels of abstraction when a person was unaware of foundational premises. Seigenthaler was confused, but came out very publicly complaining about Wikipedia. To me, blaming him for killing Kennedy would be comparable to telling a story of him abducting Harold Holt, or having Jimmy Hoffa‘s dead body, or being intimately involved in any other story in the list of conspiracy theories.
The Wikipedia community responded seriously to Seigenthaler’s complaint but he never seemed to be conscious of how ridiculous it was for him to be offended because someone said something weird about him on the Internet. He was still imagining that Wikipedia had an editorial board like a conventional publishing house or newspaper or television news studio. Everything turned out fine for Wikipedia because we needed an excuse to have a policy for biographies of living persons, and having an overblown incident of cultural misunderstanding as an origin story is a great beginning. The media record about all of this is strange throughout, because internationally, many people did not realize the joke in the Kennedy murder accusation, and even in the United States somehow the media was not following that the vandal intended to be funny. Anyway, I am saying all this to share that this contemporary television show made this same lame decades-old joke, and with yet more time passed, and with Wikipedia being more international, I know that many people will miss the context. I grew up in an environment where people discussed the possibility that Kennedy shot first and I am not able to see anyone have this discussion without thinking of the jokes.