CIA & Vatican edited Wikipedia pages

[ÐøÞÞlégäñgèr]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/augus...b_wikipedia.htmhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6947532.stmWednesday, August 15, 2007Pnline tools that reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries. Wikipedia Scanner allegedly shows that workers on the agency's computers made edits to the page of Iran's president. It also purportedly shows that the Vatican has edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.Wikipedia is a free online encyclopaedia that can be created and edited by anyone. Most of the edits detected by the scanner correct spelling mistakes or factual inaccuracies in profiles. However, others have been used to remove potentially damaging material or to deface sites.The site also indicates that a computer owned by the US Democratic Party was used to make changes to the site of right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh. The changes brand Mr Limbaugh as "idiotic," a "racist", and a "bigot". An entry about his audience now reads: "Most of them are legally retarded." The IP address is registered in the name of the Democratic National Headquarters. The site also indicates that Vatican computers were used to remove content from a page about the leader of the Irish republican party Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams. The edit removed links to newspaper stories written in 2006 that alleged that Mr Adams' fingerprints and handprints were found on a car used during a double murder in 1971. The section, titled "Fresh murder question raised" is no longer available through the online encyclopaedia. Wikipedia Scanner also points the finger at commercial organisations that have modified entries about the pages. One in particular is Diebold, the company that supplied electronic voting machines for the controversial US election in 2000. In October 2005, a person using a Diebold computer removed paragraphs about Walden O'Dell, chief executive of the company, which revealed that he had been "a top fund-raiser" for George Bush. A month later, other paragraphs and links to stories about the alleged rigging of the 2000 election were also removed. Staff at the US Congress have also previously been exposed for editing and removing sensitive information about politicians. An inquiry was launched after staff for Democratic representative Marty Meehan admitted polishing his biography. The new tool was built by Virgil Griffith of the California Institute of Technology. It exploits the open nature of Wikipedia, which already collects the net address or username of editors and tracks all changes to a page. The information can be accessed in the "history" tab at the top of a Wikipedia page. By merging this information with a database of IP address owners, Wikipedia Scanner is able to put a name to the organisation and firms from which edits are made.

 

[Wakka]

The site also indicates that a computer owned by the US Democratic Party was used to make changes to the site of right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh. The changes brand Mr Limbaugh as "idiotic," a "racist", and a "bigot". An entry about his audience now reads: "Most of them are legally retarded." The IP address is registered in the name of the Democratic National Headquarters.
:naughty:

 

[ÐøÞÞlégäñgèr]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/augus...credibility.htmCredibility Of Wikipedia Takes a Dive After Wired ExposéOnline encyclopedia outed as bias tool of intelligence agencies, corporations by new Wikipedia Scanner database Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet Tuesday, August 14, 2007 The credibility of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has taken another dive after a newly developed software program exposed how the CIA, corporations like Diebold and others routinely edit entries to bury criticism and manipulate the truth. In our previous investigation, we revealed how a group of trolls were engaged in a concerted campaign to erase the 9/11 truth movement, along with a host of other controversial subjects, out of cyber existence by voting to delete pages about subjects and individuals that obviously warrant a page on Wikipedia. Examples we cited included such manifestly provable "conspiracy theories" as "List of Republican sex scandals," "People questioning the 9/11 Commission Report" and "Movement to impeach George W. Bush". Trolls were even allowed to delete the Wiki page for Dylan Avery, who has appeared on Fox News, CNN and in hundreds of newspaper reports. Avery is the producer of the most watched documentary film in Internet history, he clearly merits a biography page on an online encyclopedia, but Wikipedia had no qualms in letting Morton Devonshire and other trolls deep six the entry. Griffith has compiled a list of different corporations and branches of government that have abused the so-called impartiality of Wikipedia to essentially edit the truth out of existence, replacing it with a PR friendly facade favorable not to the facts or any sense of neutrality, but only to the interests of the parties concerned.The Wikipedia Scanner http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/ also allows users to type in an IP range and find out which organizations are editing what pages on Wikipedia."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," concludes the Wired report.Wikipedia is fast becoming a complete anathema to reliable research and will see its wavering reputation as a trustworthy source for information quickly evaporate if it continues to allow itself to be abused by intelligence agencies, corporations and dedicated trolls. Unless Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (pictured top) acts immediately to completely restructure Wikipedia's entire operating system, the online encyclopedia will gradually combust and degenerate into nothing more than a laughing stock.

 

[ÐøÞÞlégäñgèr]

http://infowars.net/articles/august2007/190807Wikipedia.htmSeeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits KATIE HAFNER NY Times Sunday Aug 19, 2007Last 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.Last year, someone at PepsiCo deleted several paragraphs of the Pepsi entry that focused on its detrimental health effects. In 2005, someone using a computer at Diebold deleted paragraphs that criticized the company’s electronic voting machines. That same year, someone inside Wal-Mart Stores changed an entry about employee compensation.Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, says the site discourages such “conflict of interest” editing. “We don’t make it an absolute rule,” he said, “but it’s definitely a guideline.”In general, changes to a Wikipedia page cannot be traced to an individual, only to the owner of a particular network. In 2004, someone using a computer at ExxonMobil made substantial changes to a description of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, playing down its impact on the area’s wildlife and casting a positive light on compensation payments the company had made to victims of the spill.Gantt Walton, a spokesman for the company, said that although the revisions appeared to have come from an ExxonMobil computer, the company has more than 80,000 employees around the world, making it “more than a difficult task” to figure out who made the changes.Mr. Walton said ExxonMobil employees “are not authorized to update Wikipedia with company computers without company endorsement.” The company’s preferred approach, he said, would be to use Wikipedia’s “talk” pages, a forum for discussing Wikipedia entries. An Anheuser-Busch employee eventually took responsibility for the changes to the SeaWorld page — but only after being challenged about them twice by another user. A person identifying himself as Fred Jacobs, communications director for the company’s theme park unit, said on the entry’s “talk” page that discussion of the ethics of keeping sea creatures captive “belongs in an article devoted to that subject.”Mr. Jacobs referred questions about the editing to another company office, which did not respond to requests for comment. The SCO Group, a software maker in Salt Lake City, made changes to product information in its own entry this year. The company has been involved in legal disputes over the rights to some open-source software. Craig Bushman, the company’s vice president for marketing, said he had told a public relations manager to make the changes. “The whole history of SCO had been written by someone who doesn’t know the history of SCO,” he said. An hour after the changes were made, he said, they disappeared. The company e-mailed Wikipedia administrators, who replied that the changes had been rejected because of a lack of objectivity. In the case of the Wal-Mart revisions, David Tovar, a company spokesman, said that while he was not aware of anyone within Wal-Mart who had asked to contribute to Wikipedia, the changes could have been made by any of its workers, who are called associates. “We consider our associates our best ambassadors,” he said, “and sometimes they speak out to set the record straight.”At Dell, the computer maker, employees are told that they need to identify their employer if they write about the company online. “Whether it’s Wikipedia, Twitter or MySpace, our policy is you have to let someone know you’re from Dell,” said Bob Pearson, a Dell spokesman.Before that policy was put in place a year ago, changes to parts of Dell’s Wikipedia entry discussing its offshore outsourcing of customer service were made by someone from the Dell corporate network.WikiScanner is the work of Virgil Griffith, 24, a cognitive scientist who is a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Mr. Griffith, who spent two weeks this summer writing the software for the site, said he got interested in creating such a tool last year after hearing of members of Congress who were editing their own entries.Mr. Griffith said he “was expecting a few people to get nailed pretty hard” after his service became public. “The yield, in terms of public relations disasters, is about what I expected.” Mr. Griffith, who also likes to refer to himself as a “disruptive technologist,” said he was certain any more examples of self-interested editing would come out in the next few weeks, “because the data set is just so huge.”

 

[ÐøÞÞlégäñgèr]

http://www.911blogger.com/node/10758Underwriters Laboratory edits Wikipedia 9/11 Blogger Monday Aug 20, 2007With Virgil Griffiths' new Wikiscanner tool, I was able to find that UL worked anonymously to delete my Wikipedia page. http://infowars.net/articles/august2007/200807Wikipedia.htmMore Details on the Wikipedia Propaganda Encyclopedia Kurt Nimmo Monday Aug 20, 2007Wikipedia is not only a magnet for CIA and FBI hacks, but for multinational corporations as well. “Massaging Wikipedia entries has become a well-established phenomenon as the reach of the world’s most popular online reference work has become apparent,” especially if there are official enemies to attack or crimes to be sanitized. “Last year the site was transformed into a political battleground in the US, with politicians’ aides accused of ‘vandalizing’ entries on opposition figures,” sort of a cyber version of dirty tricks, legendary behavior for both the FBI and CIA, long tasked with taking out the opposition. In a way, though, victims of such efforts may consider themselves lucky, as the CIA has dealt with official enemies in other countries more severely, viz., they are often assassinated. Of course, some claim the CIA and the FBI have engaged likewise tactics here, most notably in regard to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Finally, “in a signal of how tempting it can be for interested parties to amend articles, Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder, himself ran into controversy in 2005, when he admitted editing his own Wikipedia entry.”http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/augus...200807Putin.htmVladimir Putin rewrites Russia's history books to promote patriotism Shawn Walker London Independent Monday Aug 20, 2007Critics are accusing President Vladimir Putin's government of a Soviet-style rewriting of Russian history with a series of new "patriotic" textbooks to be unveiled in the new school year. New laws passed this summer have given the government sweeping powers over which textbooks will be used in schools. Teachers and other critics have voiced concerns that this will allow the government to force the use of a single, approved book in each subject - essentially a return to Soviet practice.On 5 August, the Orthodox Church held a ceremony to mark 70 years since the start of Stalin's "Great Purge", but no government officials attended. Mr. Putin said that while 1937 shouldn't be forgotten, other countries had behaved far worse, making references to Hiroshima and the Vietnam War. "We should not allow anyone else to make us feel guilty. Let them think about themselves," he said.The textbook's final chapter covers Mr Putin's rule. It describes the Yukos affair as a message from government to big business: "Obey the law, pay your taxes, and don't attempt to rise above the state." The message was heard, says the book. This or similar books could soon be the only option Russian history teachers have for use in the classroom.