Companies and party aides cast censorious eye over Wikipedia * Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent * The Guardian * Wednesday August 15 2007 Wikipedia Wikipedia entries ranging from Labour Students to a US supplier of voting machines have undergone some massaging Editing your own entry on Wikipedia is usually the province of vain celebrities keen for some good PR. But a new website has uncovered dozens of companies that have been editing the site in order to improve their public image. The Wikipedia Scanner, which trawls the backwaters of the popular online encyclopaedia, has unearthed a catalogue of organisations massaging entries, including the CIA and the Labour party. Workers operating on CIA computers have been spotted editing entries including the biography of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, while unnamed individuals inside the Vatican have worked on entries about Catholic saints - and Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams. Meanwhile, an anonymous surfer from Labour's Millbank headquarters excised a section about Labour Students which referred to "careerist MPs" and criticisms that the party's student movement was no longer seen as radical. And somebody from a computer traced to Democrat HQ edited a page on conservative American radio host Rush Limbaugh, calling him "idiotic", "ridiculous" and labelling his 20 million listeners as "legally retarded". But the biggest culprit that the Scanner claims to have discovered is Diebold, a supplier of voting machines, which it says has made huge alterations to entries about its involvement in the controversial "hanging chad" election in the US in 2000. The company was criticised in the wake of the disputed results, but edits made by its employees on Wikipedia have included the removal of 15 paragraphs detailing the allegations. "In August 2003 Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold, announced that he had been a top fundraiser for George W Bush ..." the deleted text read. "When assailed by critics for the conflict of interest ... he vowed to lower his political profile." The change, made two years ago, was quickly reversed and the culprit warned off for "vandalism". A Diebold official was not available for comment. Read the full content…… It is not the first time people have been found editing their own Wikipedia entries, which is considered a breach of etiquette on the site. Last year some US Congressional staff were found to be removing information they deemed unsavoury from the profiles of the politicians they worked for, and this year computer group Microsoft back-pedalled after it was revealed to have offered money to experts to "correct" entries about it on the site. The Scanner, built by Virgil Griffith, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, works by comparing 5.3m edits made on the encyclopaedia against the internet addresses of more than 2m companies or individuals. Edited entries Republican party Apparently replaced the term "occupying forces" with "liberating" in an article referring to the Iraq war. Somewhat less controversially, a Republican staffer also rewrote a biography of American revolutionary leader George Rogers Clark. Democrat party Somebody using a computer inside Democrat HQ edited a page on conservative American radio host Rush Limbaugh, calling him "idiotic", "ridiculous" and labelling his 20 million listeners as "legally retarded". Fox News Users traced back to the rightwing TV station have edited a number of pages about its presenters, including excising information about reporter Shepard Smith, who became infamous after saying "blowjob" on air. CIA Alongside numerous revisions about America's national security and geography, a surfer using a CIA address also took the time to add extensive sections on lightsabre combat in the Star Wars movies. Labour party A section on Labour Students was edited to remove a section on the rise of the career politician. "It is sometimes claimed that Labour Students has helped the rise of careerists within the party at the expense of more radical leftwingers," said the deleted text. -The Guardian ______________________Haha from "occupying" to "liberating". Lmao...
Well like everything on the internet, take everything you read with a grain of salt. Incidentlly, this is one of my fave Penny Arcade comics:
you can but use it as a starting point and possibly cross reference it with a source such as .edu or some respectable site.
I never use wiki as my main source of information for projects and such. My friend edited an article last year and put some crap in it. It was taken off only a few weeks ago...
Wiki is a great source of information, people who say its terrible are those who read what they write. What you really should be doing is looking at its references and use those as your sources of information.
yeah i always wiki my way to things i don't know..has even become dependent on it already lol...i guess someone has to reinforce screenings before approving the edited entries
wiki is actually quite accurate... for a debate i had to do in school i looked up wiki as a starting source as always and i thought it would be really funny if i changed the the info on it so that when the people on the opposing side in my tutorial tried to use wiki they would get all the wrong numbers... the information on the page only stayed incorrect for like an hour before someone changed it back
^yeh they did the same thing on a TV programme they edited a load of pages and all were changed back to the original in very little time by wiki mods
yeah, it is. but only for unimportant things? i mean i don't use wiki for research because any of it could be made up. sure, i'd glance at the info but not take it seriously. and has no one heard of this guy who apparently wrote some sort of eulogy or something of that sort on wikipedia about a man who was not dead? this prankster got sued for it and so did wikipedia for letting him put that false info on the site. i think it happened a few years back and ever since then, i've don't really trust wikipedia.
