iampowered: Wikipedia: Another day another blunder

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The online edition of Wired Magazine has an article up that really seems to question the trustworthiness of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. As Wired puts it:

"Sleuthing into the accuracy of the open-source web encyclopedia known as Wikipedia has led to the door of its founder, Jimmy Wales."

Why the wariness over Wikipedia founder Wales? Well, apparently (actually Wales has admitted to this now) over a period of at least 3 or 4 months (probably much longer), Wales edited his own biography on Wikipedia. More to the point, his edits actually cast himself and his accomplishments in a more positive light.

On his blog "Workbench," Roger Cadenhead has posted a number of really telling examples of Wales' edits. Here's just one of the examples that blogger Cadenhead points out:

"On Oct. 28, 2005, he changed the text "Wales and Sanger set up Wikipedia" to "Wales set up Wikipedia." He made the change again later that day and repeated it on Nov. 9 and Dec. 1 -- other editors kept putting language back in that credited Sanger."

When I first read about this, my first thought was to question why Wikipedia founder Wales would do this for a number of reasons. First, why would Wales take a chance and do this after Podfather Adam Curry already got nailed for doing something so similar?

Another reason that would seemingly make most of us think twice about doing something like this is that the timing is simply off. With all of the news questioning the creditability of Wikipedia (the John Siegenthaler Sr incident comes to mind) you would think that Wales would just leave well enough alone. That being said, I realized pretty quickly that many of these edits took place before either the Adam Curry or Siegenthaler incidents were pushed into the news. Surely, Wales would have thought better of doing this if he had been aware of those Wikipedia scandals.

One final thought though: Even though Wikipedia has been under fire, its transparent nature is partly what allows us to discover whether someone edits their own bio etc. Perhaps that means that the Wikipedia system of checks and balances is working (even when one of its own founders admits to crossing the line).

Wired - Wikipedia Founder Edits Own Bio