'the truth according to wikipedia'

from vpro: Google or Wikipedia? Those of us who search online - and who doesn't? - are getting referred more and more to Wikipedia. For the past two years, this free online "encyclopedia of the people" has been topping the lists of the world's most popular websites. But do we really know what we're using? Backlight plunges into the story behind Wikipedia and explores the wonderful world of Web 2.0. Is it a revolution, or pure hype?

flashback: who's editing wikipedia? diebold, cia & wal-mart

dutch royals caught revising wikipedia

from ap: A Dutch royal couple acknowledges altering a Wikipedia entry about a 2003 scandal that forced the prince to renounce his claim to the throne.

Prince Johan Friso, son of the reigning Queen Beatrix, and Princess Mabel of Oranje-Nassau are the latest to be embarrassed in a spate of discoveries of vanity changes to Wikipedia entries. Such self-serving amendments are frowned upon in the Web encyclopedia that "anyone can edit."

The original scandal broke in 2003 when Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende refused to support the prince's marriage to the princess, then known as Mabel Wisse Smit.

The prime minister said he objected because she had given him "incomplete and incorrect information" about a romantic liaison she once had with a druglord. Wisse Smit later conceded knowing the drug dealer but denied any sexual relationship.

With government approval of the marriage withheld, the prince had to choose between Wisse Smit and his place as second in line to the throne. They married in 2004.

On Jan. 8, 2006, someone using a computer at Huis ten Bosch, the royal palace in The Hague, altered the Wikipedia entry on Wisse Smit that had said she "gave misleading and false information" to Balkenende. The new entry removed the words "and false."

Wikipedia shows the time and IP address — the numerical identifier of each computer on the Internet — of edits made by someone who doesn't sign on with a user name.

After the connection between the 2006 edit and the palace recently circulated in the Dutch media, Friso and Mabel acknowledged they were the revisionists.

"They both made the changes together in order to make the entry match the letter which they sent to the prime minister (explaining why they misled him) in 2003," spokesman Chris Breedveld said Thursday. The couple feel that due to repeated mistakes in the media, an "incorrect version of events has arisen," he said.

Similar self-interested Wikipedia edits have popped up for years in government and business. The finds accelerated this month after a U.S. graduate student developed an online "Wikiscanner" to more easily track the sources.

listen to an interview with virgil griffith, the creator of wikiscanner, on the alex jones show from august 30, 2007.

american airlines: 9/11 didn't happen

from daily kos: WikiScanner discovered that American Airlines changed their Wikipedia entry to state that Flights 11 and 77 never flew on 9/11.

Original entry was:

Two American Airlines aircraft were hijacked and crashed during the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack: American Airlines Flight 77 (a Boeing 757) and American Airlines Flight 11 (a Boeing 767).

New entry is:

Two American Airlines aircraft were hijacked and crashed during the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack: Flight 77 (a Boeing 757) and Flight 11 (a Boeing 767). Although these flights were daily departures before and a month after September 11, 2001. Neither flight 11 nor 77 were scheduled on September 11, 2001. The records kept by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (www.bts.gov/gis/) do not list either flight that day.

A Google search of the IP address that made the change - 144.9.8.21 - is located at American Airlines.

Why the change American airlines? Did the flights actually operate or did we just imagine all of that? ...

Go to their website www.aa.com to tell them what you think.

update: american airlines visits media monarchy
i love it when corporations come & read stories about themselves...

who's editing wikipedia? diebold, cia & wal-mart

from wired: On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

Wikipedia Scanner - the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith - offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein...

The result: A database of 5.3 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.

Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.

Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President George Bush.