Companies are getting in trouble for editing their own Wikipedia pages. Many people know that Wikipedia tracks their editing history and even uses that activity to spot tampering, but some people seem unaware of that tracking.
Virgil Griffith took it one step forward and built WikiScanner to match IP addresses from these edit histories to their owners. Organizations like Sony, Diebold, Nintendo, Dell, the CIA and the Church of Scientology were all shown to have sanitized pages about themselves.
Sandy Ordonez, the spokeswoman of Wikipedia' parent Wikimedia Foundation, said in a Reuters article, "It violates Wikipedia's neutrality guidelines for a person with close ties to an issue to contribute to an entry about it."
How close to your subject matter is too close? Who defines close?
Even altering that position to say that "anyone who stands to benefit from an edit can't make the edit" is subject to subjectiveness. Who defines benefit? We all benefit from the Wikipedia, right?
I think that anyone with any knowledge at all on a topic should not be allowed to add that knowledge to the Wikipedia.
GrimJack
EZ Street
Jon Sable, Freelance
Comments (2)
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w3ace 508 days ago
It's a bit like the Government, the only ones that should be allowed to have the power to govern are the ones that would never want anything to do with politics.
Eliot 508 days ago
I met Virgil at CCCamp, really cool stuff.