Russell Brown in the Listener on the Wikipedia edits

"A fraction too much friction
by Russell Brown

It took an American student to show us why Wikipedia should never be taken as gospel.

The appearance of the Wikipedia Scanner – a web-based tool that has disgorged an apparently endless list of self-interested interventions in the online encyclopedia by organisations as diverse as the CIA, Amnesty Inter‑national, Fox News and the voting-machine maker Diebold – has rightly generated global media interest.

But many reports missed the fact that it has always been possible to do what American student Virgil Griffith did with this new tool. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but anyone making a change anonymously will have their IP (internet protocol) address logged against the change they have made. An investigator with a modicum of technical skill can easily trace the IP address back to its source."

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More editing at Wikipedia

From stuff.co.nz:

"If you believe the NSW Premier's Department's version of history, a profanity-laden outburst Morris Iemma had at a media conference last year never happened."

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And for a NZ connection to the Wikipedia editing findings

From Russell Brown's public address blog:

"I looked up some IP addresses logged against dodgy edits of New Zealand Wikipedia articles -- the old-fashioned way, rather than with the scanner -- but didn't find anything of interest. Part of the problem is that addresses here tend to resolve to third parties: so there's a bit of vandalism on the Helen Clark article from an IP address in the same block as the National Party's mail server -- but it's also the same block (controlled by dts.net.nz) as the Parliamentary web server, which doesn't tell you much."

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More Corporate Edits on Wikipedia

Following the item on Fox News editing Wikipedia entries here is an article from The New York Times describing the extensive practice from Corporations:

"Last year a Wikipedia visitor edited the entry for the SeaWorld theme parks to change all mentions of “orcas” to “killer whales,” insisting that this was a more accurate name for the species.

There was another, unexplained edit: a paragraph about criticism of SeaWorld’s “lack of respect toward its orcas” disappeared. Both changes, it turns out, originated at a computer at Anheuser-Busch, SeaWorld’s owner.

Dozens of similar examples of insider editing came to light last week through WikiScanner, a new Web site that traces the source of millions of changes to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor’s network. The address information was already available on Wikipedia, but the new site makes it much easier to connect those numbers with the names of network owners.

Since Wired News first wrote about WikiScanner last week, Internet users have spotted plenty of interesting changes to Wikipedia by people at nonprofit groups and government entities like the Central Intelligence Agency. Many of the most obviously self-interested edits have come from corporate networks"

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And here's the article from Wired magazine referred above...