Wiki-edits

I've been amused by the story of the uncovering of corporate members editing their company's Wikipedia page using the new page, Wikiscanner. There have been some embarrassing edits that you can check out from Wired's posting of some of the most egregious edits including what someone at the ACLU put in about Pope Benedict XVI and molesting young boys and degrading women or how a person at the NEA edited criticism out about themselves. Or some people at the New York Times making these edits.

And The New York Times Company is among those whose employees have made, among hundreds of innocuous changes, a handful of questionable edits. A change to the page on President Bush, for instance, repeated the word “jerk” 12 times. And in the entry for Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, the word “pianist” was changed to “penis.”

And there are enough examples to embarrass all sides of ideological debates such as revisions that Wal-Mart employees made on that page. Or that someone at NRA made about the NRA.

Is anyone surprised that people took advantage of Wikipedia's open editing capabilities? DId anyone think that human nature would be repealed and people wouldn't succumb to the temptation to write good things about themselves or their company and bad things about people or entities that they oppose? Of course it had to happen. But the cool thing is that technology has come to the rescue with the ability to identify the IP addresses of those making the edits. People are having a lot of fun playing around at Wired to identify those edits.

People should know what they're getting when they read Wikipedia, despite many of my students' beliefs that reading a Wikipedia article is all the research they have to do for my classes. And people will get used to clicking on over to the edit page on Wikipedia to see if anyone involved in the story has been editing the entry.

Probably the next thing we'll be seeing is that people will be smart enough to make their edits from a computer that won't embarrass them or their employers. They'll be editing from public libraries or internet cafes. That's the nature of Wikipedia. It's still a wonderful resource that most of us use all the time to find out plots of movies, a map of a Civil War battle, or a quick explanation of a scientific term. As long as you're aware of what you're getting - the combined wisdom of anonymous writers, which can be awesome or awful - you'll get about what you paid for when you clicked on over there.