We’ve all thought it. Some have said it. Now a new service is proving it: Wikipedia isn’t the impartial, unbiased tool that so many claim it to be:

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company’s machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations. Source: Wired

Wikipedia Scanner could potentially expose the thousands of self-interested edits made to the “encyclopedia” every year. Like I said - a lot of us have known this for a long time. But now we finally have some proof of just who’s behind some of this data.

Can you really call a source “reliable” if it is being manipulated by the very subjects it covers? I don’t think so.

So when will Google stop ranking them in the top 10 for everything? Will this searchable database of proof change the way Google sees Wikipedia? What do you think?
- Matt