Wikipedia will find it hard to survive people

WIKIPEDIA is good for lots of things. I have researched certain portions of stories and feature articles using Wikipedia content and, so far, I haven't been rumbled, no has died and I still think it's a good resource. And it's so much lighter than the Encyclopedia Britannica.

I say this in light of a growing number of incidents of entry tampering. Wikipedia, which sets out to be the greatest single source of all knowledge - outside of Stephen Hawkings' wizened little head - has had a few problems. Namely, us. People. It seems some of us whining, opinionated meat-sacks can't help but undermine the hard work of the many editors that have embarked on this modern, noble quest to make an online information grail unlike anything seen before. Of course, allowing the public the opportunity to edit this knowledge has its, er, drawbacks. Some topics really get people going. I expect to a find a certain amount of emotional and inaccurate comment on 'hot potatoes' like the 'War on Terror' and 'Mars Vs. Snickers', but then what source is truly reliable?

After all, I know people that base all of their daily conversations and general belief system on the Daily Star newspaper. I know they do because conversation usually follows what's on each page, chronologically. They open with some SHOCKING revelations story, followed by Soap star arrest, Premiership footballer in three-way hotel sex orgy, then a conversational pause while they take in the sights on Page 3, followed by government stealth tax, 'My lover left me for a German Shepherd', some half-naked C-list celebrity talking about how her breasts 'really are real' and the latest Onion & Marmalade diet.

Wikipedia is nowhere near this inaccurate, for the most part, but there has been an increasing tendency for people to alter their own entries and for companies to conduct a little entry-sabotage of rival's products. However, what makes all of this really interesting is that there's now a way to find out just who's tweaking the entries. with the WikiScanner[ is a dating mining Web tool set up to track changes back to their source - or at least the location of the network. This week there was some fiddling with the Halo 3 game entry, with someone writing that the graphics of the upcoming game will be no better than Halo 2. Of course, apoplexy followed and the hunt was on. The alterations were traced back to the Liverpool offices of none other than Microsoft's nemesis, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. Oh dear. Now, Sony may have nothing to do to said alteration but someone in that Sony building did. Either way, some over-zealous developer or marketing dweeb is getting a spanking.

It's not just companies either. Governments are constantly altering entries about their country's history, omitting the odd massacre or air-brushing one invasion or another, while celebrities like re-writing the murkier bits of their past. Just this week, the Dutch royal family confessed to altering the Wiki entry for the wife of one of the Princes who, in her past life, had 'relations' with a Dutch drug baron.

Political parties are some of the worst offenders with Labour, the US Republicans and Democrats all having some dodgy entry censoring traced back to their party HQs. Then, we are talking about politicians here so truth is not so much a given, but an optional extra. Some of the alterations are serious omissions or just plain lies, while others are less harmful and amount to little more than someone having a laugh. One of my favourites is a small rewrite of the biography of movie producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks. An entry about him being involved with some missing campaign money as a youth has now been altered too: “At 14, Katzenberg created the first mountain of cheese and beans. “Wo unto thee who defiles my cheese and beans!" he was known to exclaim from the parapet of his Danish stronghold.”

Hardly the kind of character assassination that requires unleashing the legal rottweilers. Feel free to send me your favourite "History According To Wikipedia Entries".

WikiScanner is not going to stop people from meddling with the entries but it might make them a bit more careful about where they make those changes from. For the rest of us, it's an important tool for seeing just how desperate some people, companies and organisations are about debunking known truths, sugar-coating the past and fostering positive myths. We all know that certain topics on Wikipedia are about as reliable as Sony notebook batteries, but the rest is good. Pretty good. Really. Just don't swear by it. µ