Say Anything Blog

Update: It turns out that the article I linked below was satire.  That’s what I get for not reading the fine print at the bottom.  But, I think my point about people editing their own Wikipedia entries stands.  If they’re changing factual information, what’s the problem?

The list of people caught changing their Wikipedia entry grows.

NEW YORK – Computers at the campaign headquarters of Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani were used to make fifteen changes to Mr. Giuliani’s Wikipedia page last week, earning America’s Mayor the Virgil Griffith award for the period ending August 18.

This soon-to-be-notorious award is named after Virgil Griffith, the CalTech graduate student who created Wikiscanner, a program that tracks the sources of edits made to Wikipedia pages.

Runners up for the Virgil Griffith award were Michael Vick, eleven changes, Karl Rove, nine, and Hillary Clinton, eight favorable amendments.

The alterations to Mr. Giuliani’s Wikipedia page included upgrading his high school class ranking from 299 to 130 out of 378, revising his combined SAT score from 931 to 1,073, reducing the number of draft deferments he received during the Vietnam conflict from six to three, and deleting the account of his father’s raping three prison guards and the warden’s dog while doing time at Sing Sing.

The problem I have here is that Rudy, or staffers on his campaign as the case may be, is essentially being criticized for changing his Wikipedia entry to reflect better on him.  Yet, the article doesn’t mention if any of the changes to the entry were right or wrong.  If the corrections made by Rudy’s people were accurate, what’s the big deal?

Isn’t accuracy sort of...the point?

If you’re a VIP and you see a Wikipedia entry with incorrect info about you on it, is it wrong for you to correct it?  It shouldn’t be, but the way some are reacting to stories like the one above the mere act of editing your entry - whether the changes you make are accurate or not - is bad.