Wikipedia is back in the news as someone has developed a scanning tool that will tell where people who edited an article were coming from. This has led to the shocking news that people from government agencies and corporations have been editing some articles. Firstly this is old news. Secondly why should we care? I seriously doubt the FBI or CIA ordered these edits, they were made by some staff member who thought they saw something wrong. I suspect their boss wouldn’t approve of them editing because it leads to exactly these types of ‘revelations’. Lastly this is part of Wikipedia, good and bad and the system as it stands is built well enough to defend against it if someone abuses an article.

I don’t want knowledgeable people discouraged from editing articles, even if they are political hot topics. I want everyone with a bit to put in to put it in and let the editing process take over from there. I am as suspicious of politicians, corporate fat cats and bureaucrats as anyone you will ever meet and the scanning tool is a great way to look to see if an article is being abused, but the idea that we should demonize people who post without looking at what they are posting really bothers me.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 5:31 pm and is filed under News, Pettiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.