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Someone inside the Howard administration has been messing around on Wikipedia. Someones, to be more precise – the Australian government has been credited with more than 5000 edits to the international open-access encyclopedia. But such manipulations can’t be traced to any single worker, and the site’s undifferentiating accessibility is its very hallmark. How significant is this discovery?

Not very. In fact, hardly at all — a government body should be more concerned if its workers aren’t recasting its international face in a flattering light. As US TV personality Stephen Colbert so aptly put it, Wikipedia is the Second Life of any major organization – a chance to highlight its best attributes while ignoring the rest.

Ever since the site’s inception, any teacher worth their salt has been warning their students away from referencing the site, and for good reason. Wikipedia contributors are historically anonymous. If anyone can edit and add, who can be responsible for verifying?

A new online tool is starting to shrink the freedom of that anonymity. Wikiscanner, a site developed by American grad student Virgil Griffith, can track all Wikipedia editors to their host IP address, exposing the corporate or government networks responsible for any single rewriting, additions or deletion.

The tool has since revealed all manner of glossy corporate makeovers, some even due to outside public relations firms: DynCorp, a US-based private military contractor, eliminated a section on its alleged brothel rings, State Farm Insurance Company erased mention of their post-Hurricane Katrina legal troubles and paper products company Kimberley-Clark deleted all references to their possibly illegal logging.

Most organizations, the Howard government included, have reframed history via omission rather than straight-out lying. Treasurer Peter Costello’s familiar “Captain Smirk” nickname has been removed several times, along with some less-than-glowing commentary on the PM’s “children overboard” policies.

Howard, wisely, has been quick to avow that he never asked any staffer to make such changes, and at his word the matter must be dropped. Other than alarming taxpayers with wasted work-hours productivity, is the knowledge that some bored government worker took the time to make almost 50 updates to the Gang-gang cockatoo page really of any interest?

At the very least, there hasn’t been any in-house hostility. Plenty of other employees have spent business hours sabotaging their superiors. Take, for instance, the one Dreamworks worker who rewrote the childhood biography of the company’s CEO. Instead of working for the NYC mayor's office, teenage David Katzenberg was reported to have "created the first mountain of cheese and beans. ‘Wo unto thee who defiles my cheese and beans!’ he was known to exclaim from the parapet of his Danish stronghold”.

Silliness has long existed on Wikipedia, and it remains no crime. The site’s editors do their best to keep it as clean as possible, but users pepper it ceaselessly with new information 24 hours a day and misinformation is simply bound to slip through the cracks. I’ll never forget skimming a page on the Iranian hostage situation to discover part-way through a one-sentence paragraph boldly declaring, ‘Lisa is a slut’. This is not the Encyclopedia Britannica.

One of the most gleefully mocked Wikiscanner finds has been the CIA employee who logged serious desk hours contributing to an article on “erotic spanking”. I’m sure many people would be more surprised that the activity merited an encycolopedia article than that a CIA employee had a fetish for punishment, but there’s the strange beauty of Wikipedia. This community-built site, the work of however-many enthusiasts of however-many things, is ultimately far greater than the sum of its parts — or the identities of its contributors. If the Howard government did more than its expected share in shaping public knowledge, good on it, although its greater service is in simply reminding the public to read such open Internet sites with a grain of salt.

Sources:
DynCorp
State Farm
Kimberly-Clark

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