21 August 2007

‘FBI, CIA changed Wikipedia entries’

‘FBI, CIA changed Wikipedia entries’

WASHINGTON: A new scanning program has revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have been editing Wikipedia entries on topics ranging from the Iraq war to Guantanamo, a Russian news agency Novosti reported.

WikiScanner has traced editorial changes made to the online encyclopaedia to FBI and CIA computers, including the removal of satellite imagery of the Guantanamo prison camp on the island of Cuba, and redactions of articles on the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The program revealed that the CIA edited entries about its former director, William Colby, altering details of his career, and that a graphic on casualties in Iraq was manipulated to downplay the figures, it reported. A number of commercial companies were also found to have edited entries related to them, in clear violation of Wikipedia’s editorial guidelines that disqualify people or organisations from editing articles that concern them directly. However, a spokeswoman for Wikipedia’s parent company Wikimedia, said the online encyclopaedia was in any event self-correcting. daily times monitor

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