Wikipedia Capers

So many people think that they can be anonymous on the Internet.

They think there's no way to trace one's cyber-footsteps.

Big mistake.

From The Guardian:

Editing your own entry on Wikipedia is usually the province of vain celebrities keen for some good PR. But a new website has uncovered dozens of companies that have been editing the site in order to improve their public image.

The Wikipedia Scanner, which trawls the backwaters of the popular online encyclopaedia, has unearthed a catalogue of organisations massaging entries, including the CIA and the Labour party.

Workers operating on CIA computers have been spotted editing entries including the biography of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, while unnamed individuals inside the Vatican have worked on entries about Catholic saints - and Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams.

...And somebody from a computer traced to Democrat HQ edited a page on conservative American radio host Rush Limbaugh, calling him "idiotic", "ridiculous" and labelling his 20 million listeners as "legally retarded".

But the biggest culprit that the Scanner claims to have discovered is Diebold, a supplier of voting machines, which it says has made huge alterations to entries about its involvement in the controversial "hanging chad" election in the US in 2000. The company was criticised in the wake of the disputed results, but edits made by its employees on Wikipedia have included the removal of 15 paragraphs detailing the allegations.

...It is not the first time people have been found editing their own Wikipedia entries, which is considered a breach of etiquette on the site. Last year some US Congressional staff were found to be removing information they deemed unsavoury from the profiles of the politicians they worked for, and this year computer group Microsoft back-pedalled after it was revealed to have offered money to experts to "correct" entries about it on the site.

The Scanner, built by Virgil Griffith, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, works by comparing 5.3m edits made on the encyclopaedia against the internet addresses of more than 2m companies or individuals.

Tampering with Wikipedia entries is nothing new.

After Steve Irwin died in that tragic freak accident, some jerk altered the entry on Irwin to say:

"Steve Irwin's dead! LOLOLOLOLOL!"

That was truly sick.

It wasn't a politically motivated move. It was a cruel, demented act.

I'm not at all surprised that aides to politicians play with Wikipedia.

It doesn't surprise me one bit that attacks on Rush Limbaugh and his audience would be traced to Democrat headquarters.

I'd expect nothing less from those supposedly civil, sophisticated, compassionate libs. Calling Limbaugh "idiotic" and "ridiculous" and calling his millions of listeners "legally retarded" is exactly what I've come to expect from Democrats.

Here's an excerpt from Christopher Anderson's American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power:

[W]hen several aides fantasized about playing some sort of practical joke on "W" and his incoming administration, Hillary nodded her approval. "Wouldn't it be hysterical," she said with a wry smile, "if someone just happened to remove all the w's from the computer keyboards?" Taking Hillary at her word, outgoing staffers dashed from office to office plucking the offending w keys from scores of keyboards. Others went much further, pouring coffee into file cabinets overturning desks, leaving X-rated messages on voice-mail machines, soiling carpets, tinkering with computers, and drawing obscene pictures on office walls.

Oh, that Hillary and her "wry smile"!

Dems are so good at doing damage.

It's one of the very few things that they do successfully.