Wal-Mart, CIA, ExxonMobil Changed Wikipedia Entries… I guess you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet

A new Web site built by an American technology student has uncovered the lengths that companies apparently go to improve their public image by tweaking their entries on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that – famously – “anyone can edit.”

The WikiScanner site, developed by Virgil Griffith, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, reveals changes to the online encyclopedia by linking edits back to the computers from which they emanate using each computer’s unique IP address.

Griffith, 24, says he created the site “to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike” – a mission he may well have succeeded in.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsCmNps-R4U[/youtube]

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Life in Japan, Videos. 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.