An intellectual freedom blog with an emphasis on libraries and technology

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Diebold edits away computer scientists' concerns

According to a database that tracks the sources of anonymous edits to Wikipedia, Diebold, the manufacturer of defective and easily hacked touch-screen voting machines has had someone heavily edit a Wikipedia article about these voting machines. According to Virgil Griffith, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, someone from Diebold deleted "wholesale a 15-paragraph section describing computer scientists’ concerns with the devices."

Read the Chronicle of Higher Education article that alerted me to this rather unscholarly editing job.

Here's a link to Wikipedia scanner the database of the origin of edits.