Wikipedia narcissism

It has recently been discovered that many top organisations have been editing their Wikipedia entries to present themselves in a more favourable light; however this form of censorship has been vilified by Wikipedia’s creators.

It appears that companies believe their Wikipedia entries has a large impact on their public image, so much so that many companies have employed people to trawl through their profiles and edit them in a more positive light. The WikiScanner which tracks which entries have been ‘massaged’ has found that top organisations such as the CIA and the Labour Party. The editing of CIA entries has been traced back to workers’ computers from the Central Intelligence Agency, which includes changes to the biographies of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Vatican employees have also been found editing entries about Catholic saints, and the Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams. An anonymous editer at Labour's Millbank headquarters removed a section from the Labour Students entry referring to ‘careerist MPs’ and a part which argued that the party's student movement was no longer seen as radical.

Further image ‘massaging’ which has taken place includes the editing of the profile of conservative American radio host Rush Limbaugh, by a computer traced to Democrat HQ, which named the host as “idiotic”, “ridiculous” and called his 20 million listeners “legally retarded”. However the company which the Scanner found to have made the greatest amount of changes was Diebold, a supplier of voting machines, which has been found to have edited large chunks of info about its involvement in the controversial "hanging chad" election in the US in 2000, when results of the election were disputed.

Editing your own entries on Wikipedia is regarded as going against the website’s whole protocol of user-generated information. The Scanner which has enabled these edits to be traced back to the places they orginated, was built by Virgil Griffith a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, and works by comparing the 5.3 million changes made in entries on the encyclopaedia against the internet addresses of more than 2 million companies or individuals.

Source:

Guardian

Times Online