In one of the cooler applications I’ve heard of lately, Virgil Griffith created wikiscanner, a tool designed to bring to light the sources of edits that may have been made to Wikipedia with less than pure motives.
The NY Times has an entertaining article on it:
Last year a Wikipedia visitor edited the entry for the SeaWorld theme parks to change all mentions of “orcas” to “killer whales,” insisting that this was a more accurate name for the species.
There was another, unexplained edit: a paragraph about criticism of SeaWorld’s “lack of respect toward its orcas” disappeared. Both changes, it turns out, originated at a computer at Anheuser-Busch, SeaWorld’s owner.
Dozens of similar examples of insider editing came to light last week through WikiScanner, a new Web site that traces the source of millions of changes to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
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Since Wired News first wrote about WikiScanner last week, Internet users have spotted plenty of interesting changes to Wikipedia by people at nonprofit groups and government entities like the Central Intelligence Agency. Many of the most obviously self-interested edits have come from corporate networks.
The article goes on to provide more examples of corporations and/or organizations altering their entries, either to benefit their own interests or just to mess around. I have to give the NYT special props on this too, because they even describe a few edits attributed to someone within their own company:
And The New York Times Company is among those whose employees have made, among hundreds of innocuous changes, a handful of questionable edits. A change to the page on President Bush, for instance, repeated the word “jerk” 12 times. And in the entry for Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, the word “pianist” was changed to “penis.”
2 Comments
is someone alleging that corps changing their articles is bad? i mean, if anyone edits an article, it’s because they have an interest. anyone that has an interest generally has an opinion and certain types of people are going to try to let that opinion be known. i don’t see why it makes a difference if that person has some sort of official capacity and “less noble” edits on wikipedia don’t break the wiki model, they make it stronger.
Most of the cases the article cites involve companies going in and changing and/or removing things that portray them in a negative light.
While those may sometimes be legitimate corrections, they also are likely to be biased in such a way that is likely to result in a non-objective (at best) or totally inaccurate (at worst) article. This is why people editing their own entries is generally discouraged in the Wikipedia community, and the same should apply to corporations.
Of course, other people can then go in and fix those changes, but corporations will almost always have more interest and more resources at their disposal for keeping on top of their entries, whereas in many cases there are not dedicated community volunteers that can keep up and keep them honest.
This is just a tool to help people do that, and to provide some accountability for companies making the edits. BTW, Wikipedia itself is actually strongly supportive of the purpose behind wikiscanner (see the “Wikipedia reaction” section of the WikiScanner entry in Wikipedia).