Wikipedia Wars: Using the Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia to Further Personal Agendas

"You are not currently logged in. While you are free to edit without logging in, your IP address will be recorded in this page's edit history. Creating an account will conceal your IP address and provide you with many other benefits." (Wikipedia.org)

It's not the most threatening of messages. Anyone interested in adding content to Wikipedia, or editing the content already available on the international online Encyclopedia, can do so anonymously. With a simple trip to the computer banks at the local library, one can do so anonymously and virtuously untracabley.

It'a all in the first line of the Wikipedia home page: "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit."

Wikipedia is an invaluable resource. Capitalizing on the fact that there are approximately 1 billion Internet users worldwide, and a large number of them are experts in their various fields, the wiki medium for maintaining an Internet encyclopedia is not only brilliant, but it allows for the transmission of newer and more relevant information to be uploaded to Wikipedia entries all day, any day, every day. Entries are usually updated by intrepid users within hours or even moments of new information disseminated about the topic at hand. This ain't your father's encyclopedia.

However, as with all user driven media, the potential for abuse of the Wikipedia system is great. Wikipedia vandals abound, uploading conflicting, incendiary, or just plain humorous information into entries. In a January 15, 2007 blog published in the Sydney Morning Herald writer Stay In Touch, an excellent case of Wikipedia vandalism was recounted. "Last Friday for half-an-hour, anyone looking up the entry for "aspirin" would have been confronted by a first paragraph which began as you'd expect," read the blog, "but soon switched from science to smut."