Wikinaughtiness
The naughty devils — individuals at the CIA, DCCC and Vatican and others are, shucks, naughtily editing wikipedia entries. This after wikipedia tempbanned a bunch of Congressional IPs a while back.
I posted some thoughts on wikipedia a while back. The fact is that it’s just no use for looking at any topics that are contentious, particularly when there are childish or political individuals with an interest in them. But that’s no surprise; the idyllic dream of a large community of experts coming together to create an unimpeachable source of information was never realistic (indeed, I’m not sure who ever believed it in any case).
I am not entirely sure why people working at institutions with sensitive PR issues — including the CIA, the DCCC and the Vatican — would do stuff like this from work. It is, after all, the sort of thing that can get you in trouble. It’s not even as if the logging of IPs is a secret, because you can see them right there on the article history page.
Dizzy pointed out earlier today that IPs often aren’t traceable to individual computers (many places use Network Address Translation which, amongst other things, allows you to have one IP address for many computers). Of course, that’s not always true; at my place of work, there are many static external IPs (some institutions did better with IP allocations than others; I bet that the US government has a load of IPs, for example).
Comment by Adam — 8/15/2007 @ 4:17 pm