Misplaced Reliance on Wikipedia

If you’ve been citing Wikipedia for information, you might want to think it over two or three times. It turns out everyone’s suspicions have been correct, companies (I’ll give you a hint, one starts with a ‘W’ and ends in “mart”) and individuals have been “sanitizing” their Wikipedia entries. So your quotation and cites to Wikipedia are marginally less than authoritative.

Fortunately a tool has been made available which will tell you whether a company has been scrubbing their less than favorable Wikipedia entries. According to Wired, Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith has developed a searchable database, Wikipedia Scanner which stores the anonymous Wikipedia edits and tracks down the owner of the block of IP addresses from which the “editor” came.

What’s all that techno-babble mean? It means the scanner has been able to show someone from Diebold Election Systems, maker of electronic voting machines, deleted long paragraphs in entries on e-voting machines detailing the security industry’s concerns over e-voting. Using the scanner, it has also been shown that someone from Wal-Mart changed an entry discussing the less-than average wage of Wal-Mart when compared to other retail stores to a more favorable “[Wal-Mart] pays double the minimum wage”.

I’ve often asked other attorneys how they can cite Wikipedia as a source of information when the entries can be made by anyone, worse yet anonymously. Most of the time the answer is that the attorney doesn’t fully understand how Wikipedia works. Maybe they can look up Wikipedia’s entry on Wikipedia for help.