Date: Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Self-promotion on Wikipedia

Many high-profile companies have been discovered to be editing their profiles on Wikipedia in order to present themselves in a more favourable image; but owners of the site say this goes against the website’s inbred protocols.

A new tool has been developed at the California Institute of Technology called the WikiScanner, which enables experts to track which edits to Wikipedia articles have been made, and the computer they originated from. Using this technology it has been discovered that many top firms have been tampering with their public profile on the website. Critics have hit back saying that self-editing of profiles is against the protocols of the website of creating unbiased user-based material. Editing your own page is more like making a personal blog, which removes the objectivity that an encyclopaedia provides. The major culprits who have been found to be editing their own profiles are the CIA, where changes to their profile have been traced back to workers’ computers at the Central Intelligence Agency, where changes include alterations to the biographies of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. These are hotly followed by Vatican employees where changes to entries about Catholic saints and the Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams have been traced to Papal computers. Furthermore, an undisclosed source at Labour's Millbank headquarters has removed a section from the Labour Students profile on Wikipedia which referred to ‘careerist MPs’ and which argued that the party's student movement was no longer seen as radical.

Worse editing than this has also been found, most prominently with changes to the profile of American radio host Rush Limbaugh which named the host as “idiotic” and “ridiculous” and called his 20 million listeners “legally retarded”. These additions were traced to a computer at the Democrat HQ. The company found by the Scanner to have made the greatest amount of changes was Diebold, a supplier of voting machines, which has been found to have edited large chunks of data about its involvement in the controversial 2000 US election disputes.

Source: Guardian, Times Online