The online news has been buzzing with the story of a US college student’s “Wikipedia Scanner” as reported in Wired, BBC and numerous other places.

No wonder it’s getting attention. The tool lets you see who is really editing Wikipedia pages, and shows clearly what many in the web community have known or suspected for some time – in addition to the outright and very obvious problems of spam and articles being defaced, Wikipedia’s open editing policies have also allowed company owners and corporate as well as government spin-doctors to quietly remove any references they don’t want published and ever so softly insert their own versions.

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