Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Good overview of the recent semi-scandal of Congressional staffers editing their bosses' Wikipedia biographies (at taxpayer expense) in order to remove negative (but true) factual information and to add entries that portray their bosses in a more favorable light. The article concludes,
Looked at from another perspective, though, the massive and anonymous tweaking coming from both the House and Senate shows the glaring weaknesses of the current Wikipedia system, and illustrates nicely why it cannot be considered an authoritative source of information. One of the strengths of the current system is that tampering can be caught and fixed, and in these cases it apparently has been corrected. Still, it's a reminder that anyone with a chip on his shoulder, a cranky opinion, or a political motivation may have created the content you read on Wikipedia. Will these latest incidents finally force the "Free Encyclopedia" to do away with anonymous revisions, or did the fact that this was discovered prove the worth of the current system?