Is Wikipedia becoming a hub for propaganda?
http://tinyurl.com/yo5t4nTracking website shows thousands of changes to articles originated from federal government offices
A website that tracks the origins of millions of edits to Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, shows that computers inside federal government offices are responsible for more than 11,000 changes to articles, including some significant edits of entries about parliamentarians.
WikiScanner, a website launched on Monday by a U.S. graduate student, shows that changes to articles originated from computers inside a variety of government offices, such as the House of Commons, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Environment Canada and the Auditor-General of Canada. The site, however, does not reveal the identity of the individual who made the edits.
While many of the Wikipedia edits clean up grammar or correct facts about Canadian historical figures, geography or pop-culture icons, a significant number of edits were made to articles about politicians that removed criticisms, added positive comments and, in some cases, inserted negative comments to the pages of political rivals. And while users within the self-policing Wikipedia community often restore the undoctored versions of the articles, some have not been touched by the site's moderators.
MPs whose Wikipedia pages were significantly altered include Toronto-area Liberal Dan McTeague, Calgary Conservative Jason Kenney and Southern Ontario Conservative Jeff Watson, who serves on the Commons' access to information, privacy and ethics committee. No one from the offices of those MPs would offer comment yesterday on edits to Wikipedia articles.
Rick Broadhead, a Toronto-based Internet consultant, says in some cases finding the originating point of a Wikipedia edit is the cyber-equivalent of discovering a "prostitute's black book."
"It can be detrimental to the subject of an article that has information that casts you in a negative light or brings up events that you would rather forget about; hence, the desire to modify the entries so that particular events are recast or deleted altogether. You can't do this with Encyclopedia Britannica, but you can do this with Wikipedia," Mr. Broadhead said. "But to be seen deleting factual information - to me that borders on being scandalous. This would be a public relations nightmare ... to rewrite history in this manner."
While the technology to track down who is behind Wikipedia edits has been available for some time, it required a significant amount of technical know-how to navigate the Internet to find the same information WikiScanner can find in seconds.
Wikipedia spokeswoman Sandra Ordonez says that, although articles are collaboratively written, they are always "live" and the threat of distortion and online vandalism will always be present.
"Wikipedia kind of works as a bazaar. You have all these groups and individuals contributing and reviewing articles and entries, so it's really hard for one person to really ruin the integrity of an entry for a long period of time," Ms. Ordonez said.
Carleton University political science professor Jonathan Malloy says in an environment such as Wikipedia, where anything goes, it's not surprising that articles on politicians have been heavily edited from inside government offices.
"It's certainly a bit unethical and it's also low-end. More senior, experienced politicians realize that dirty tricks rarely work and tend to backfire on you," Prof. Malloy said.
One user, with an IP address that points to a government office in Ottawa, removed Wikipedia's entire entry on homosexuality several times on July 20, 2005, and replaced it with such sentences as: "Homosexuality is evil," "Homosexuality is wrong according to the Bible" and "Homosexuals need our help and counselling." The IP address responsible for that edit continued to deface the entry on homosexuality a total of 24 times between July, 2005, and July, 2006, and also edited more than 500 other Wikipedia articles on topics such as epidemiology, Ebola and Deal or No Deal (a TV game show starring a Canadian host).
Government computers also edited Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Wikipedia entry 10 times between Aug. 26, 2005, and Aug. 8, 2006. Opposition Leader Stéphane Dion's page was edited four times on Aug. 30, 2004, by someone at a computer traced to the House of Commons, and twice more on Oct. 3, 2006, from a computer inside a Public Works and Government Services office in Gatineau, Que.
Other pages edited from government equipment include Maher Arar's Wikipedia page, which was edited three times on Feb. 27, 2007, from a computer traced to Public Works and Government Services, and the entry on Pierre Trudeau, which was edited nine times between Oct. 7, 2002, and Feb. 22, 2007, from four different IP addresses.
Collette Dery, spokeswomen for House Speaker Peter Milliken, who also serves as chief administrative officer of the House of Commons, says there is no policy in place to prohibit any staffer in the House of Commons from editing Wikipedia articles.
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How Wikipedia works
Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia controlled and maintained by its community of readers. Anyone may contribute to an article, inserting or subtracting text regardless of its veracity or point of view. However, with thousands of users constantly monitoring content, the site operates on a kind of honour system in which users monitor articles for inflammatory or false information.
Wikipedia features more than five million articles in more than 100 languages, and is one of the top 10 most-visited websites in the world.
The online hub is maintained by the Wikipedia Foundation Inc., a non-profit charitable organization, with assets totalling more than $1-million (U.S.).
Although Wikipedia maintains a log of changes made to all of its articles, editors are tracked by their user name (if logged into the site) or an IP address if the changes are made anonymously.
David George-Cosh
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Electronic fingerprints
Earlier this week, California Institute of Technology graduate student Virgil Griffith created the WikiScanner (http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr), which allows users to search a database of millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits that cross-references the Internet Protocol address (IP) - sort of a digital fingerprint consisting of 4 to 12 different combinations of numbers - to the organizations where the edits originated.
The website allows users to search by listing specific organizations or a range of IP addresses to determine who edited which Wikipedia article. A field to search for who edited the exact Wikipedia URL was disabled after heavy site traffic.
Canadian government computers used to edit articles can be found by searching for the domain suffix "gc.ca" in the "organization name" field. From there, computers located in the House of Commons have the IP address range of 192.197.82.0 to 192.197.82.255, which was verified using commonly available WHOIS searches.
David George-Cosh
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Some infamous edits
In February of 2005, former MTV VJ Adam Curry was discovered by online sleuths to have anonymously edited his own Wikipedia page to make his role in the early days of podcasting more significant than they were.
A Wikipedia user published false information in May, 2005, suggesting that Tennessee
newspaper editor and publisher John Seigenthaler, Sr. may have been involved in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. The hoax was revealed several months after the information was posted and led to Wikipedia implementing stricter controls over how to edit pages.
In January of 2006, several U.S. congressional staffers were found inserting negative comments in Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor's Wikipedia page and removing criticisms on Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman's and Massachusetts Congressman Marty Meehan's pages.
David George-Cosh
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070816.wwiki0816/BNStory/Technology/home
posted by Bill at 9:19 AM
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Wikipedia and Ethics in Online Journalism
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