Beyond the Barrio, Internets Edition: Shady Wikipedia Edits Done By Shady Organizations

Now that a program can trace edits made on Wikipedia to the computers they were made with (and by extension, to the dastardly people who told those employees to make said edits), people can now point fingers when investigating cases of misinformation and vandalism on the online encyclopedia. And since we’ve come to grips with the soul-crushing reality that not everything Wikipedia says is true, we bring you some highlights:

On the profile of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the tool indicates that a worker on the CIA network reportedly added the exclamation “Wahhhhhh!” before a section on the leader’s plans for his presidency.

Insidious, indeed. Then, there’s this gem about über-conservative radio pundit Rush Limbaugh that was supposedly written by a campaign arm of the Democratic Party:

The changes brand Mr Limbaugh as “idiotic,” a “racist”, and a “bigot”. An entry about his audience now reads: “Most of them are legally retarded.”

Couldn’t agree more. One last example follows the jump.

We hate to open up an old wound, but mentioning the company Diebold–who manufactured the voting machines partly responsible for botching our presidential election in 2000–tends to do that:

In October 2005, a person using a Diebold computer removed paragraphs about Walden O’Dell, chief executive of the company, which revealed that he had been “a top fund-raiser” for George Bush.

Guess that lets all of the prune people in south Florida off the hook for being too feeble to punch a hole in a piece of paper.

Wikipedia ’shows CIA page edits’ [BBC News]
Image [Google]