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.

Microsoft tries to use Wikipedia as a PR tool

Microsoft has stooped too low this time. As if their operating system wasn’t bad enough, Microsoft (aka M$) has actually, get this, offered to pay a blogger (CNN) to edit technical articles on Wikipedia — to make Microsoft look and sound better.

Microsoft Corp. has landed in the Wikipedia doghouse after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced Web encyclopedia site.

While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public-relations firms, campaign workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest from posting fluff or slanting entries. So paying for Wikipedia copy is considered a definite no-no.

"We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach," Wales said Tuesday.

Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by Microsoft.

So Microsoft wanted to bribe Wikipedia regulars and when that failed they hired a ‘professional’. It’s amazing how hard they tried to get around the Wikipedia moderators, and community as a whole too! I — like many others — love Wikipedia and this kind of stuff just makes me sick. In the past politicians (specifically people from various offices of the US House of Representatives) have edited their and other Wikipedia entries to make them look better, or their opponents look worse. Microsoft said they were trying to correct the alleged imbalance and bias against them in the Wikipedia articles… what a joke.

Anyway I thought it was an interesting story, considering how the user-generated and social communities are becoming important enough for politicians and big corporations to edit their entries (using the Wikipedia example) for their own public relations benefit.

technorati tags: microsoft, wikipedia, tech, news, in+the+news, current