joaoflux / digital / analog / culture

A couple of days ago a friend asked me, if I could help fighting vandalism on a wikipedia entry about a fairly well known person (that I ma not going to name here). Recently the entry had been edited so it would imply that the person had employed questionable business practices, violated rules and published incorrect information. The Circumstances gave reason to suspect that we were facing a professional attack. The timing of the first attack suggested insider knowledge and the quality of the entry was high and on the first glimpse ot seemed well documented through external links. The editor’s Wikipedia record dated back to June 2005. Having never contributed to Wikipedia myself (shame on me), it was clear that I would look like the bad guy, if I engaged in an edit war. At some point a Wikipedia Administrator even started to role back changes by other users and thus demonstrated confidence in the attacker’s good intentions.

Since Wikipedia has become one of the principle resources for journalists and basically anybody who researches anything, altering a Wikipedia entry can be an extremely efficient move in a disinformation campaign. For victims it is quite hard to react quickly and legal action is no solution either. When it comes to individuals or corporations of public interest, manipulated information can multiply within hours or days when corporate media or even just bloggers trust the information they find on Wikipedia.

In our case the victim finally managed to convince Wikipedia to lock the site for further editing and have someone neutral research the topic. Nevertheless, the malicious content is still up as I write this. Furthermore hostile websites which are referenced in the current article get a lot of advertisement and will improve their ranking in search engines.

Ironically this democratization of disinformation is possible in the days of web 2.0, not because we’re finally all allowed to publish content, but due to the fact that their is a tendency that monopolies establish themselves, be it Google, be it Wikipedia, be it the iPod. Those are not monopolies that evil corporation impose on us. We lazy mainstream followers submit ourselves and only create them by doing so. Therefore no anti trust agency or cartel office can protect us.

There are however a few things one can do:

1. contribute (if you do not, you’re a nobody and can’t be trusted, hence you’re powerless)
2. be consistent (if you’re not, you cannot be trusted either)
3. never stop exploring (avoid using the same service all the time, avoid using what everybody uses, avoid buying what everybody thinks is cool - this is the altruistic part of your duties)

Technorati Tags: disinformation, trust, web 2.0, wikipedia