An interesting piece on Wired's blogs today notes that Wal-Mart isn't above editing its Wikipedia entry to polish its image:

Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in, changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves activist criticism on community impact intact, while citing a "definitive" study showing Wal-Mart raised the total number of jobs in a community.

Wal-Mart's edits don't appear as blatant as, say, Diebold's, whose employees edited the company's entry to omit entire paragraphs on the security industry's concerns about the integrity of Diebold voting machines, as well as information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President George Bush.

All this comes from a Wired report on a new piece of software that tracks who edits what on Wikipedia, the "edited-by-community" online encyclopedia:

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Companies better watch what and how they edit now, it seems.

See Who's Editing Wikipedia [Wired] 

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