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Wikipedia Exposed?
Virgil Griffith, a grad student from Caltech has built a tool called Threat Level that exposes Wikipedia for what it apparently is: a spin factory for malicious content, unbridled PR, and partisan hacking. From Wired:
“Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith just launched an unofficial Wikipedia search tool that threatens to lay bare the ego-editing and anonymous flacking on the site. Enter the name of a corporation, organization or government entity and you get a list of IP addresses assigned to it. Then with one or two clicks, you can see all the anonymous edits made from those addresses anywhere in Wikipedia’s pages.”
Here’s a list of some of what Threat Level has uncovered so far:
- Diabold, the controversial voting machine company, has made numerous edits to Wikipedia posts on electronic voting painting the company and their technology in a positive light.
- According to a Microsoft IP, noted open source advocate Eric Raymond “hijacked the FSF movement for the sake of self promotion”, “has never actually written any significant software” and “has contributed very little free software himself”.
- A New York Times IP addy, 199.181.174.146, adds some useful words about Bush Junior: “jerk jerk jerk jerk”, later modified to “jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk”.
- Most religious groups including Catholics, Scientologists, and Mormons have edited pages to paint their religions in a better light.
- Fema.gov vandalized the John Orman, chairman of the CFL party’s, Wiki page.Â
- Somebody using a computer inside Democrat HQ edited a page on conservative American radio host Rush Limbaugh, calling him “idiotic”, “ridiculous” and labelling his 20 million listeners as “legally retarded”.
- Alongside numerous revisions about America’s national security and geography, a surfer using a CIA address also took the time to add extensive sections on lightsabre combat in the Star Wars movies.
- The Republican Party apparently replaced the term “occupying forces” with “liberating” in an article referring to the Iraq war.
- Someone at Apple made numerous changes to the Microsoft page.
- An edit to Al Franken’s Wikipedia page was traced to FOX news corp.
- Wal-Mart removed “Wages at Wal-Mart are about 20% less than at other retail stores.”, replacing instead with “The average wage at Wal-Mart is almost double the federal minimum wage (Wal-Mart).”
- Dow allegedly purged an entire section labeled ‘Environmental and human rights controversies’ that included information about the Bhopal disaster, Agent Orange, and silicone breast implants.
I really like Wikipedia and reference articles from there all the time. Maybe I ought to think twice about that.
The one big problem I have with all this fuss about wikipedia editing is the idea that somehow a company can’t edit its wikipedia page yet everyone else can (Fox, Republican parth, Wal Mart, Dow, etc…).
I don’t care what anybody says or claims about the objectivity of Wikipeida because Wikipedia is far from objective.
Many entries have sections that include “criticisms” but they don’t have sections for “praise” because it seems to PRish or something.
The thing is, you can find good and bad things on just about any topic. Granted wikipedia requires that you reference your sources, but if someone is editing an article and they want to add a negative source, they can pick and choose the ones they want to add. Wikipedia is woefully deceptive in that way. As long as self-interest exists in this world and humans can influence the content of these articles, Wikipedia should be read with a grain of salt.
Left by Russell Page on 08/15/2007