Did The CIA Edit Wikipedia Pages?
By Christopher Nickson
August 16, 2007
A new tool to track who edits pages on Wikipedia seems to indicate that the CIA made changes to the entry on Iran�s president.
A new web tool has been developed by researchers in the US to track the identity of organizations that edit pages on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and it’s revealed some very interesting and disturbing things. The tool, called Wikipedia Scanner, has revealed that computers at the CIA made changes to the entry about Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and that it appears the Vatican altered a page relating to Sin Fein leader Gerry Adams. On the page of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Scanner has shown that someone on the CIA network reportedly added the exclamation "Wahhhhhh!" before a section on the leader's plans for his presidency. A warning was issued on the profile of the anonymous editor. A CIA spokesperson said, “I cannot confirm that the traffic you cite came from agency computers. I'd like in any case to underscore a far larger and more significant point that no one should doubt or forget: The CIA has a vital mission in protecting the United States, and the focus of this agency is there, on that decisive work.” Wikipedia entries can be edited by anyone. The tool also seems to indicate that an edit in the page of Gerry Adams came from the Vatican. The edit removed links to newspaper stories written in 2006 that alleged that Mr Adams' fingerprints and handprints were found on a car used during a double murder in 1971. Wikipedia Scanner works by going through the list of edits on the site and matching them to the editor’s net address. It’s turned up a few other problematic edits, such as one seeming to show that a computer owned by the Democratic Party made abusive edits to the page about right-wing commentator Rush Limbaugh. Most edits found by Scanner are innocuous, but others polish entries – common among politicians – and others remove embarrassing revelations. Wikipedia Scanner is the brainchild of Virgil Griffith of the California Institute of Technology. It works by merging the net address of people who edit pages on Wikipedia with a database on IP address owners.