Ethical Issues In Wikipedia Essay

Technology has revolutionized the way we all receive and perceive the information about the world. The arguably largest and most used online encyclopedia in the world is Wikipedia. This online encyclopedia is articles written/edited by anonymous sources. This created a new website called WikiScanner that allows us to pinpoint and trace corporate computer networks activity in Wikipedia edits. Although WikiScanner reveals corporations and their involvements in biased edits on Wikipedia the real problem lies within Wikipedia itself in its organizational structure and the websites choice of anonymous entries, thus always having a compromise of truth within every article about corporations. The only way to even begin to fix this problem is to understanding the organizational structure

This brings up an otherwise controversial topic over large corporations trying to secretly deceiving the public. They do so by either editing information being written by them or them just deleting the anonymous facts completely. Many of these corporations have a public relation officers or PR officers that monitor anything and everything that is being edited or inserted to the companies Wikipedia pages. This obviously would lead these PR officers to then edit or change the information to benefit their corporation. Which is where the idea to create WikiScanner comes in to expose these corporations. The article tells of many exposed politicians, corporations, products, and companies and the appreciated response from the public. Hafner ends with an interesting idea from Mr. Wales that Wikipedia should say they acknowledge the corporation who is editing the article and let them know they are monitoring their edits. Mr. Wales, Wikipedia founder, hopes this could lower the number of false