Here’s an update to my post on The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen, and “the Wikipedia Problem.”

Virgil Griffith, a CalTech graduate student, has built a search tool that traces the addresses of those who are editing Wikipedia.

The not surprising answers: Diebold — to suppress criticism of their electronic voting machines and to play down their contributions to Republican political campaigns — and Wal-Mart — to burnish their image as a fair employer with regard to wages paid to their service employees.

Also: the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Rand Corporation, the New York Times Corporation, the Church of Scientology, among others. (Here’s the Wired Editorial “greatest hits” link for those of you who want to dig a little).

Here’s a link to another story on Search Engine Journal finding that Fox News edited its own Wikipedia entry.

Some of these are apparently corrections, but the majority of these edits seem to fall in the category of spin, or possibly even truthiness. Does anyone still think Wikipedia is an objective source?