Going postal on Wikipedia
Last week Wired ran a story about a web site that allowed users to search Wikipedia’s edit records to trace ‘anonymous’ edits to the ‘editor’s’ employer (assuming, of course, that the edits were made from a company PC). The prime example detailed in the Wired story is the sleazy voting machine manufacturer, Diebold. “Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example… with someone at the company’s IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry’s concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company’s CEO’s fund-raising for President Bush.”
Organizations whose employees have made edits run the gamut from the CIA to Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and, yes, the USPS. (UPS has been busier though- while 735 edits are traced to USPS IP addresses, UPS has over a thousand).
And what have USPS users been contributing to Wikipedia? Spelling and grammar corrections make up a lot of the entries, but there are also some more interesting contributions:
- A USPS user corrected the web address of an exotic dancers forum in the ‘Striptease’ entry.
- Another asked, on the discussion page for ‘matricide’, if there was a similar term for killing one’s wife. (It’s ‘uxoricide’- you could look it up…)
- An edit to the United States Postal Service entry, with the erroneous suggestion that Congress had “made firearms possession by USPS employees a criminal offense”. The same ‘editor’ helpfully explained that the ‘Setting The Record Straight’ web page contained ‘reactionary letters sent by USPS to individuals who in the press are shared with the public’.
- In the entry for Howard Stern, a postal ‘editor’ changed the line “Stern announced that Alison was divorcing him, due to the fact that he is a workaholic” to “Stern announced that Alison was divorcing him, due to the fact that he was banging strippers.” The same ‘editor’ also made a number of other ‘helpful’ changes to the entry, scattering mentions of ‘Opie and Anthony’ throughout, changing references Stern’s employer, Sirius Satellite Radio, to its competitor, XM, etc.
- In the entry for former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, “Santorum is well known for his conservative social and fiscal stances” was changed to “Santorum is a well known jerk known for his conservative social and fiscal stances“. The same user had previously changed the entry to a one word description.
- Additions to the “Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense/Body Parts Slang” collection.
And there’s much more: here’s the link.
