Who's editing Wikipedia?

So enterprising people have found a way to track back a whole bunch of edits on Wikipedia back to IP addresses owned by the very companies those edits helped, like Diebold "deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President Bush." There are some delightfully egregious examples over here in this contest for the worst: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/wikiwatch/

The thing bugging me here is that everybody is blaming the companies for doing it, saying stuff like "Just one of many places where Wal-Mart changed content to put a favorable spin on the topic" and "Hilarious - Ford renames Honda Fit to 'Honda Loser'" and "The National Institute of Health's busy vandalizing the WikiProject Scientology to-do list...No wonder we don't have a cure for cancer or AIDS yet." (ouch!)

But nobody has shown that this was a conscious decision by the actual company -- I find it hard to believe that Bill Ford is sitting up there in a board room, going "For our next trick, vandalizing Wikipedia!" while rubbing his hands together and petting his Persian cat. The hand rubbing and cat, ok, I can see, but not so much the Honda thing. This is (probably) just some guy who works at Ford, who's bored during work and is fucking with Honda. Or people working at Wal-Mart who get mad when they see their company criticized, so putting in a correction or their own spin. I'm not saying it's good, just that it's probably not exactly corporate policy.

The whole point of Wikipedia is arguing -- there are a lot of people who hate Wal-Mart who say some pretty negative shit. If somebody who likes Wal-Mart (so much that they work there!) wants to say something positive, there's nothing wrong with that. If it's not true, somebody else will come along and disagree. And hence, Wikipedia. Viva the mishmash of half-truths, opinions and bullshit.