Wikipedia, even the CIA and the Vatican "retouch" uncomfortable entries
The site "Scanner" monitors changes to the online encyclopedia's entries
US agencies mock the Iranian leader, the Church rewrites the history of Sinn Fein
The CIA and the Vatican "retouch" uncomfortable entries in Wikipedia, the open-source online encyclopedia. Since anyone can contribute to its writing, many can take advantage by changing entries at their will. The website Wikipedia Scanner, used to monitor changes made by users to the over six million entries, discovered the interventions that are far from aligned with the spirit of Wikipedia.
By "X-raying" the encyclopedia entries, the site found two interventions that made it to the blacklist of manipulations. Using the CIA's computer network, sarcastic comments were added to the entry dedicated to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The exclamation "Wahhhhh!"—certainly not very presidential—was added before a passage from the Iranian leader's election campaign, who has very tense relations with the Bush administration and Israel.
From a computer in the Vatican, someone made embarrassing references for the curia disappear from the entry of Gerry Adams, leader of the Northern Irish Catholic party Sinn Fein, which is the political arm of the IRA in Northern Ireland. The BBC reports that references to newspaper articles published last year, which detailed the discovery of the politician's fingerprints on a car used in a double murder in 1971, have vanished.
The encyclopedia scanner allows tracking the IP, the computer identifier of every computer accessing the network, of those who modified or added entries. "Of course, we can't know who's actually at the keyboard," clarified Virgil Griffith, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology who created it. However, this "digital sleuth" has allowed for the creation of a sort of blacklist of manipulators: from governments (USA and Portugal) to multinational companies like Microsoft, from international organizations (UN, Amnesty International) to major media groups (BBC, New York Times, Reuters).
One of the most targeted entries for "retouching" is the one regarding US President George Bush. From a BBC computer, someone added "mass murderer" to his biography, while another user changed the White House occupant's second name from Walker to wanker, which means "someone who engages in autoeroticism," put a bit less elegantly.
Still from a BBC PC, the entry about former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was supplemented with descriptors like "drunk" and "sex fiend." From a United Nations computer, the entry about Oriana Fallaci was modified: "racist" was added to the biography of the controversial Florentine writer.
THE VATICAN'S RESPONSE - The accusations that the Holy See manipulated a Wikipedia "entry" are "devoid of any seriousness and logic," claims Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi. "It's absurd," Lombardi explains, "to even imagine that such an initiative could have been considered: there are more than a thousand people in the Vatican who have access to computers, and even more visitors to the Museums, the Library, and the Apostolic Archive who can also browse the internet from a workstation. It is obviously possible that someone—concludes Father Lombardi—, as a private individual, could have accessed Wikipedia from a Vatican PC, but the Holy See has nothing to do with it."
