A website that tracks the origins of millions of edits to Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, shows that computers inside federal government offices are responsible for more than 11,000 changes to articles, including some significant edits of entries about parliamentarians.
WikiScanner, a website launched on Monday by a U.S. graduate student, shows that changes to articles originated from computers inside a variety of government offices, such as the House of Commons, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Environment Canada and the Auditor-General of Canada. The site, however, does not reveal the identity of the individual who made the edits.
While many of the Wikipedia edits clean up grammar or correct facts about Canadian historical figures, geography or pop-culture icons, a significant number of edits were made to articles about politicians that removed criticisms, added positive comments and, in some cases, inserted negative comments to the pages of political rivals. And while users within the self-policing Wikipedia community often restore the undoctored versions of the articles, some have not been touched by the site's moderators.
MPs whose Wikipedia pages were significantly altered include Toronto-area Liberal Dan McTeague, Calgary Conservative Jason Kenney and Southern Ontario Conservative Jeff Watson, who serves on the Commons' access to information, privacy and ethics committee. No one from the offices of those MPs would offer comment yesterday on edits to Wikipedia articles.
Rick Broadhead, a Toronto-based Internet consultant, says in some cases finding the originating point of a Wikipedia edit is the cyber-equivalent of discovering a "prostitute's black book."
"It can be detrimental to the subject of an article that has information that casts you in a negative light or brings up events that you would rather forget about; hence, the desire to modify the entries so that particular events are recast or deleted altogether. You can't do this with Encyclopedia Britannica, but you can do this with Wikipedia," Mr. Broadhead said. "But to be seen deleting factual information - to me that borders on being scandalous. This would be a public relations nightmare ... to rewrite history in this manner."
While the technology to track down who is behind Wikipedia edits has been available for some time, it required a significant amount of technical know-how to navigate the Internet to find the same information WikiScanner can find in seconds.
Wikipedia spokeswoman Sandra Ordonez says that, although articles are collaboratively written, they are always "live" and the threat of distortion and online vandalism will always be present.
"Wikipedia kind of works as a bazaar. You have all these groups and individuals contributing and reviewing articles and entries, so it's really hard for one person to really ruin the integrity of an entry for a long period of time," Ms. Ordonez said.
Carleton University political science professor Jonathan Malloy says in an environment such as Wikipedia, where anything goes, it's not surprising that articles on politicians have been heavily edited from inside government offices.
"It's certainly a bit unethical and it's also low-end. More senior, experienced politicians realize that dirty tricks rarely work and tend to backfire on you," Prof. Malloy said.
One user, with an IP address that points to a government office in Ottawa, removed Wikipedia's entire entry on homosexuality several times on July 20, 2005, and replaced it with such sentences as: "Homosexuality is evil," "Homosexuality is wrong according to the Bible" and "Homosexuals need our help and counselling." The IP address responsible for that edit continued to deface the entry on homosexuality a total of 24 times between July, 2005, and July, 2006, and also edited more than 500 other Wikipedia articles on topics such as epidemiology, Ebola and Deal or No Deal (a TV game show starring a Canadian host).
