Do you rely on Wikipedia for your information? There is no doubt that it is a great resource. However, certain posts may be, well, biased. That is because employees of government agencies and major corporations may be selectively editing out information that reflects badly on those agencies and companies.
Take for example changes on Wikipedia entries on the 1989 Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Alaska that edited out the seriousness of the environmental impact. Or, how several paragraphs of an entry that focused on the detrimental health effects of Pepsi were mysteriously deleted.
Wikipedia keeps track of the internet protocol addresses of anyone making edits on an entry, but until now, it was difficult to link those addresses with their sources. WikiScanner, however, makes that job a whole lot easier, linking the Exxon editing back to Exxon itself, and the Pepsi editing back to Pepsi Co. WikiScanner has even outed the CIA, well, as far as being able to tell us some of the entries they have touched. How is that for conspiracy theory?
One of the nice things about Wikipedia is that shady editing often gets corrected quite quickly, thanks to the users themselves who seem quick to smell a rat.
And Wikipedia does offer “talk” pages, where it encourages companies to go, identify themselves and debate controversial entries, rather than going in and doing extensive edits.
WikiScanner was created by a computer science graduate student, Virgil Griffith, who said that he got interested in creating the WikiScanner tool after he heard about some congressmen who were editing their own entries.
Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia told the New York Times News Service that he is considering some changes to Wikipedia that would alert users editing entries to the information about them that is being collected.
To visit the WikiScanner website, go to http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr
Mary Ann Romans writes about everything related to saving money in the Frugal Blog, technology in the Computing Blog, and creating a home in the Home Blog. You can read more of her articles by clicking here.
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