[LINK] SMH: 'Wicked pedia: Vatican, CIA edit online entries'

[Roger Clarke]

Wicked pedia: Vatican, CIA edit online entries
The Sydney Morning Herald
Date: August 16 2007
Bobbie Johnson in London
http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2007/08/15/1186857594702.html

EDITING your own entry on Wikipedia is usually the province of 
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 encyclopedia, has unearthed a catalogue of organisations 
massaging entries, including the US Central Intelligence Agency and 
the British Labour Party.

Workers operating on CIA computers have been spotted editing entries 
including the biographies of the former presidents Ronald Reagan and 
Richard Nixon, while unnamed individuals inside the Vatican have 
worked on entries about Catholic saints - and the Sinn Fein leader 
Gerry Adams.

And somebody from a computer traced to Democrat headquarters edited a 
page on the conservative American radio host Rush Limbaugh, calling 
him "idiotic", "ridiculous" and labelling his 20 million listeners as 
"legally retarded".

The Scanner says Diebold, a supplier of voting machines, 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 fund-raiser for George Bush," the deleted text 
read. "When assailed by critics for the conflict of interest Š he 
vowed to lower his political profile."

Last year some US congressional staff were found to be removing 
information from the profiles of the politicians they worked for and 
this year the computer group Microsoft back-pedalled after it was 
revealed to have offered money to experts to "correct" entries about 
it.

The Scanner, built by Virgil Griffith, a researcher at the California 
Institute of Technology, compares 5.3 million edits on the 
encyclopedia against the internet addresses of more than 2 million 
companies or individuals.

Guardian News & Media


-- 
Roger Clarke                  http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/
			            
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Visiting Professor in Info Science & Eng  Australian National University
Visiting Professor in the eCommerce Program      University of Hong Kong
Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW