The Montreal Gazette
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
The Internet has made information easily available in quantities never imagined before in the history of humankind.
Anyone with access to a computer can read the most recent Supreme Court decision, see videos or live coverage of events halfway around the world, communicate instantaneously, track down obscure facts, and retrieve information about people, places and things in the blink of an eye.
The problem is that some of the "information" on the Internet is not exactly 100-per-cent reliable. Some of it is lies, some is nonsense.
Montrealers heard this cautionary note loud and clear last week with the news that a Wikipedia entry about Frank Zampino, chairman of the Montreal executive committee, had been tampered with by an unknown writer. Zampino rightly characterized as defamatory the falsehoods the anonymous writer had inserted into his biographic entry. The site asserted, briefly, that he is a Nazi and a member of an anti-Semitic group.
The attack on Zampino's good name was unusually crude for Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia that virtually everyone can have a hand at editing. But a new online tool that can trace Internet Protocol numbers and so identify the computer from which a change is made, has now brought us still more information, of undisputed accuracy and considerable interest: The muddying of Zampino's biographical sketch was done from a conference room at city hall.
It turns out entries on people in public life are often made by ... people in public life.
WikiScanner, as the tool is called, tracked various changes in Wikipedia entries to machines in the offices of the CIA, the Vatican, the United States Democratic Party and Diebold, a voting-machine supplier in the U.S., according to a number of published reports.
A computer linked to a CIA address added "Wahhhhhh" to an entry about Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to Newsday.com. The CIA was reported to have said it would not confirm its computers were used in any additions.
Here in Canada, the Globe and Mail reported more than 11,000 edits of Wikipedia entries were made from computers within federal government offices. Why do public officials have so much time on their hands? You get the impression of bureaucrats and politicians spending all day burnishing their own entries and besmirching those of their rivals.
Now that word about the power of WikiScanner is spreading, we can hope there will be a powerful deterrent effect on anyone thinking of meddling with entries.
But more likely, we're afraid that those with base motives will just become more sly and devious. The struggle for accuracy and fairness continues.
The moral of the story goes far beyond city hall, or Wikipedia. People using the Internet for research purposes should view these latest incidents as a reminder the prudent course is check and double-check facts through a variety of sources.
Wikipedia, as a study by Nature magazine found, is not vastly less accurate than other encyclopedias. In its comparison, Nature found Encyclopedia Britannica had 2.92 mistakes per article, whereas Wikipedia had 3.86.
There lies the warning: Few sources of information are 100-per- cent error-free. User beware.
