You know that people want to get rid of any bad mention of them - so do companies (even at the cost of information that maybe, people should be able to know about).  Well….now it's been found that Wikipedia entries on controversial companies and individuals are being sanitized by their agents.

I suppose you can't expect Diebold not to remove bad Diebold press…. except it's bad form to be discovered doing just that…and that's what happened.

Here's a sampling of the kind of "sanitized Wikipedia" entries that have been found using a "searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of Internet IP addresses - Here’s the website"

Makes you kinda wonder……. what else is being sanitized.

The results (courtesy of Wired)? It’s interesting…

• MySpace: Someone from an IP address belonging to MySpace edits the “censorship” section for MySpace’s Wikipedia entry
• MSN Search is major competitor to Google:  That addition to the MSN Search Wikipedia page was added by an IP address belonging to Microsoft’s PR firm, Waggener Edstrom
• Exxon Mobil: “Glass half full or half empty? Someone using an ExxonMobil IP address changed the discussion of the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster and subsequent cleanup from one focusing on the company’s failure to pay $5 billion it purportedly owed to Alaska fisherman to one touting in detail the money it had already spent”
• Diebold: You’ve heard of Diebold, the e-voting machine, right? 15 “critical” paragraphs were removed from the Diebold page by an IP address for the Diebold corporate offices
• President Bush: A change to George W. Bush’s page says “IS TAINTED BY POLITICAL BIAS THAT HAS NO PLACE IN WIKIPEDIA.” This came from an IP address from the Justice Department in Washington D.C.