The hugely popular web-based, free content encyclopedia project Wikipedia currently features more than two million English-language articles. According to the site, “[Every] day hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to enhance the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia.” And apparently among those visitors making edits are agents of corporate and political entities with special interests. In August of this year Virgil Griffith’s WikiScanner began to shed some light on this phenomenon. Among other things, it enabled two Associated Press journalists in Arkansas to discover that “state computers were used to edit information about Republican presidential candidate and former Gov. Mike Huckabee , [current Gov. Mike] Beebe and others.” These journalists are currently pursuing a lawsuit, accusing Arkansas officials of breaking state law by withholding information about which government computers were used to edit these politically sensitive Wikipedia pages. Perhaps the outcome will merit an addition to this entry .
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