Can Wikipedia Bios on Political Candidates Be Altered to Affect Public Opinion?

With Reports that Someone Went into Gov. Sarah Palin's Wikipedia Page and Added New Information, We Could Be Headed Toward a Wikipedia Edit War

Looks like we may be finally feeling the impact of Wikipedia in a time when a lot of people rely much too heavily on the popular information site. As soon as John McCain announced that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin would be his running mate, someone went into Palin's Wikipedia page and added new information about her that fortunately seemed to be all correct, though might be considered subjective. It was obviously someone who wanted to pad out the details about Palin when likely a lot of people Googled up her name to find out more about her within minutes of the news. So far, Wikipedia reports that there was only one edit on the information the previous unknown person posted about Palin, even though that could likely lead to an edit war.

Considering Wikipedia wasn't yet around in 2000 when we last had an election that people claimed was the most important in many a moon, Wikipedia may finally show what its pull is in this election based on its convenience of being at the top of Google searches. How that'll influence people will remain to be seen, but there isn't any doubt that too many people use the pages now in a way that's going to get a lot more misinformation out there when America is already suffering from a bad case of misinformation that comes from the net.

Most people think that John Kerry lost the election in 2004 because of his swift boating scandal due to other media outlets. Is it possible, though, that Wikipedia was an unreported part of the picture already then? Wikipedia was going in 2004 despite not being the behemoth force it was a year or two later. Of course, Kerry's page has the swift boating information all over it today that all seems to be based on fact taken from other reliable sources. It's not known now what might have been put on his page right before people went to vote in November of '04. It'd be interesting to get a snapshot of Kerry's page at the time to find out.