Wednesday 15 August 2007

Who's a Wikipedia editor?

Anyone! (with internet access).

Many have heard the stories of American politicians editing their own pages on Wikipedia, the online, open-source wiki encyclopedia that everyone knows about, to make themselves look better. Turns out the good ol' CIA has done the same to its enemies.

An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries.

Wikipedia Scanner allegedly shows that workers on the agency's computers made edits to the page of Iran's President.

It also purportedly shows that the Vatican has edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.

The tool, developed by US researchers, trawls a list of 5.3m edits and matches them to the net address of the editor.


The Pope editing an article on the political wing of the IRA? America's intelligence community spamming up the profile of Iran's president? Does anyone have anything better to do than wiki-spam? (I myself am an active editor on Wikipedia.) I always figured the majority of people who mucked up the all-mighty Wikipedia were either people with radical views on the subject at hand or middle schoolers who were able to get past the site blockers in their school computer lab. It turns out everyone from Congressional staffers to holy men at the Holy See are in on it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

cool have fun w/ that