A clever graduate student at Cal Tech has come up with a piece of software that reveals the locations of people who make anonymous edits of articles in Wikipedia. The results range from the bizzare to the downright shady. Wired’s Threat Level blog has a list of voter favourites.
Highlights include:
- Someone inside Diebold editing its own Wikipedia entry to remove criticism of its electronic voting machines.
- Someone inside Dow, the chemical company, removing an entire section on environmental and human rights controversies, including a section on the Bhopal disaster.
- Someone inside the BBC changing George W Bush’s middle name from Walker to "wanker".
The idea that self-interested institutions or individuals commonly edit their own entries in Wikipedia isn’t a new one, but it is surprising to find that such conflicts of interest are so widespread. Still, it would be a mistake to assume that they have exposed fundamental flaws in the Wikipedia project.
The main reason not to worry is that the Wikipedia scanner is likely to serve as a deterrent to such conflicts of interest in the future. Diebold, Dow, the BBC and dozens of other companies and organisations are likely to come out of this with egg on their face, something that is likely to make their partisans less likely to meddle with Wikipedia entries.
