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Fox, NYT Play With Wikipedia

IP addresses associated with news organizations have been connected to edits made in Wikipedia that either smear rivals or remove negative information from their entries.
Fox, NYT Play With Wikipedia
Fox, NYT Play With Wikipedia
No one can claim innocence on either side of the political spectrum when it comes to playing with Wikipedia entries. The online encyclopedia that anyone can edit sometimes suffers from that openness.

The debut of an automated Wikipedia edit tracker - Wikipedia Scanner - from CalTech grad student Virgil Griffith made it easier for people to see the connections between anonymous edits and the netblocks of IP addresses from which they originate.

Big organizations tend to own blocks of IP addresses to suit their Internet communication needs. It's unlikely a random person would be using an address that is part of a netblock. That makes it easier to find out who has been playing fast and loose with Wikipedia entries.

Both Fox News and the New York Times have been caught being naughty with certain entries. The Geeks Are Sexy blog has a long list of Fox News edits. Here's an example:

...you’ll find changes that were made by IP address 12.167.224.228, which resolves to Fox News. Changes are to the articles “Keith Olbermann”, “Chris Wallace”, “Carl Cameron”, “Brit Hume”, “Shepard Smith”, “Al Franken”, “Brian Wilson”, “CNN”, and “Greta Van Susteren”.

From

O’Reilly’s show, ”[[The O’Reilly Factor]]”, airs on the Fox News Channel at the same time as Olbermann’s show on MSNBC, garnering ratings six times higher than Olbermann’s.
To
O’Reilly’s show, ”[[The O’Reilly Factor]]”, airs on the Fox News Channel at the same time as Olbermann’s show on MSNBC, garnering ratings ten times higher than Olbermann’s.
Little Green Footballs said the New York Times edits they found "graphically illustrated" their biases. One NYT edit to the entry for George W. Bush added the word 'jerk' 12 times.

Another NYT edit "changed a description of Tom Delay from 'a prominent member of the Republican Party' to 'a Grand Dragon of the Republican Party.'"

Other noteworthy edits to Wikipedia entries in the past have been made by controversial voting machine maker Diebold, as well as numerous tweaks made from US Congress addresses.

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News Tags: News, Fox, wikipedia, Geeks, NYT

Comments

Wikinonsense

Wikipedia reminds me of that old joke about the encyclopedias in the Soviet Union with the loose leaf pages.

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