Date: Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Companies censor their Wikipedia entries
It has been revealed in the past week that many top companies have been editing their Wikipedia profiles in a bid to present a better public image. The discoveries were made by the new WikiScanner which has been developed, embarrassing many high-profile figures.
An expert from the California Institute of Technology has developed the WikiScanner, which tracks changes that are made to Wikipedia articles and the computers they originate from. Many of these changes have been found to have been made by top companies such as the CIA . The changes made to the biographies of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon were traced back to CIA computers. Vatican sources have also been found to have made alterations to entries about Catholic saints and the Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams.The Labour Party have also been criticised following the deletion of a section from the Labour Students profile on Wikipedia which referred to ‘careerist MPs’, and another which argued that the party's student movement was no longer seen as a radical force. The excisions were all traced back to computers at the Labour Millbank HQ, causing further embarrassment for the party.
This so-called ‘massaging’ of entries on Wikipedia is surprisingly wide-spread with companies increasingly eager to enhance their public profile. Further editing has taken place in the profile of conservative American radio host Rush Limbaugh, which named the host as “idiotic”, “ridiculous” and called his 20 million listeners “legally retarded”. The changes have been traced to a computer registered to the Democrat HQ. However the company which the Scanner found guilty of the most excising of data is Diebold, a supplier of voting machines, which removed large amounts of data regarding its involvement in the controversial "hanging chad" election in the US in 2000, in which results of the election were disputed. The data on the deleting of information in the encyclopedia was gathered from a bank of 5.3 million changes made, against the internet addresses of more than 2 million companies or individuals.
Source:
Guardian
Times Online
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