Editing your own entry on Wikipedia is usually the province of vain celebrities, but a new website has uncovered dozens of companies that have been editing the site in order to improve their public image. The Wikipedia Scanner has unearthed a catalogue of organisations massaging entries, including the CIA and the British Labour party.
Workers operating on CIA computers have been spotted editing entries such as the biography of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, while individuals inside the Vatican have worked on entries about Catholic saints.
But the biggest culprit the Scanner claims to have discovered is Diebold, a supplier of voting machines, which it says has made huge alterations to entries about its involvement in the controversial “hanging chad” election in the United States in 2000. The company was criticised in the wake of the disputed results, but edits made by its employees on Wikipedia have included the removal of 15 paragraphs detailing the allegations. The changes, made two years ago, were quickly reversed and the culprit warned off for “vandalism”.
It is not the first time people have been found editing their own Wikipedia entries, which is considered a breach of etiquette on the site. Last year some US congressional staff were removing information they deemed unsavoury from the profiles of the politicians they worked for. This year Microsoft back-pedalled after it was revealed to have offered money to experts to “correct” entries about it on the site.
The Scanner, built by Virgil Griffith, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, works by comparing 5,3m edits made on the encyclopaedia against the internet addresses of more than two million companies or individuals. — Â