Tracking Wikipedia’s Manipulations

In 2006, we learned that staff mem­bers on Capi­tol Hill logged into Wikipedia and gave a par­ti­san air-brush­ing to the biogra­phies of var­i­ous Con­gress­men and Sen­a­tors. Mean­while, in 2005, 15 para­graphs were mys­te­ri­ous­ly delet­ed from a Wikipedia entry on Diebold, the major Amer­i­can vot­ing machine ven­dor that has found itself at the cen­ter of recent elec­tion con­tro­ver­sies. And soon enough, these edits were traced back to a Diebold IP address.

All of this raised the ques­tion: Just how often is Wikipedia the vic­tim of biased edit­ing? And to what extent can cor­po­rate and polit­i­cal entries be trust­ed? Accord­ing to Wired, some of these ques­tions may be soon put to rest. A new web site called Wikipedia Scan­ner pro­vides a “search­able data­base that ties mil­lions of anony­mous Wikipedia edits to orga­ni­za­tions where those edits appar­ent­ly orig­i­nat­ed…” Much more eas­i­ly, users can now get a bead on just how preva­lent these spin jobs are, and, more impor­tant­ly, they can help keep these par­ti­san edits under bet­ter con­trol. Will Wikipedia Scan­ner (and pro­gram like it) help save Web 2.0? Per­haps so.

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Relat­ed con­tent:

• Wikipedi­a’s (Some­times Dirty) Lit­tle Secret
• Col­lege Bans Wikipedia
• How Web 2.0 Will Trans­form the Human­i­ties