The Ministry of Truth is where the main character of the book Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, works.  The Ministry of Truth is involved with news, entertainment and the fine arts. Its purpose is to rewrite history and change the facts to fit party doctrine, for propaganda effect. For example, if Big Brother makes a prediction that turns out to be wrong, the employees of the Ministry of Truth go back and rewrite history so that any prediction Big Brother previously made is accurate.  There is no record kept of the previous history as it is destroyed as soon as history has been rewritten.

After this weeks revelation that Australian Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet were editing Wikipedia articles to remove details that might be damaging to the Government, the Ministry of Truth doesn’t sound so far fetched after all.  Of course I am not surprised, are you?

 

IF YOU believe the Premier's Department version of history, an outburst Morris Iemma had at a media conference last year - calling the then chief executive of Sydney's Cross City Tunnel a "f---wit" - never happened.  The online encyclopaedia's entry on Mr Iemma included details of last year's profanity-laden remarks, which he made not knowing his microphone was switched on. But on September 12 last year someone using a computer in the NSW Premier's Department - which includes Mr Iemma's office and those of his cabinet ministers - removed all traces of the outburst from Wikipedia.

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The most embarrassing edit traced to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC) is an act of vandalism on a martial-arts related entry, in which the user wrote, “Poo bum dicky wee wee” on the page in an apparent test. (See it here.)

In June this year a user linked to the PMC removed a description of Peter Costello as “Captain Smirk”.

You can see the full catalogue of changes made by the PMC department here

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Of course the Australian Government isn’t alone when it comes to changing Wikipedia entries.

 

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.  

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users 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.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.

The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.

Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.

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Wikipedia Scanner outs Vatican, CIA

Wikipedia Scanner, allegedly shows that workers on the agency's computers edited the page of Iran's president, the BBC reported.

It also purportedly shows that the Vatican has edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and "massaged" entries on several Catholic Saints.

It is believed the Vatican removed a link to newspaper stories alleging Mr Adams's fingerprints and handprints were found on a car used during a double murder in 1971.

On the profile of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the tool indicates a worker on the CIA network reportedly added "Wahhhhhh!" before a section on the leader's plans for his presidency.

Though Wikipedia posted a warning on the profile of the anonymous editor saying: “You have recently vandalized a Wikipedia article, and you are now being asked to stop this type of behavior”, the CIA denied confirming whether the Internet traffic came from any of the agency computers.

“I cannot confirm that the traffic you cite came from agency computers.

"I'd like in any case to underscore a far larger and more significant point that no one should doubt or forget: The CIA has a vital mission in protecting the United States, and the focus of this agency is there, on that decisive work,” an agency spokesman said.

A user at the US Democratic party headquarters was responsible for editing American right-wing radio DJ Rush Limbaugh's entry to describe him as a "racist" and a "bigot", while describing his audience as "legally retarded".

Other, more innocuous, changes include tweaks to celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey.

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However unlike The Ministry of Truth in the George Orwell novel and to Wikipedia’s credit, when changes are made to Wikipedia the changes can be traced and the original article is not lost after a change has been made. 

 

You cannot actually change anything in Wikipedia...   …you can only add to it. Wikipedia is a database with an eternal memory. An article you read today is just the current draft; every time it is changed, we keep both the new version and a copy of the old version. This allows us to compare different versions, or restore older ones as needed. As a reader, you can even cite the specific copy of an article you are looking at. Just link to the article using the "Permanent link" at the bottom of the left menu, and your link will point to a page whose contents will never change.

 

When you bring up a page at Wikipedia you will notice a “History” tab at the top of the entry and if you click on this tab you will be able to see all of the editing that has occurred to the article.  Plus now with Wikiscanner if the edit was made anonymously you can trace where the change came from.

 
An important point in Wikipedia’s own words:
 

We do not expect you to trust us.

 It is in the nature of an ever-changing work like Wikipedia that, while some articles are of the highest quality of scholarship, others are admittedly complete rubbish. We are fully aware of this. We work hard to keep the ratio of the greatest to the worst as high as possible, of course, and to find helpful ways to tell you what state an article is currently in. Even at its best, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a primary source, with all the limitations it entails. We ask you not to condemn Wikipedia, but to use it with an informed understanding of what it represents. Also, as some articles may contain errors, please do not use Wikipedia to make important decisions.

 

 

I thought that this article was nicely written and please note it is a work of satire:

 

President tries to calm investors by making edits on Wikipedia

By Philip Maddocks

GateHouse News Service

Fri Aug 24, 2007

Natick -

Seeking to calm nervous investors, President Bush announced on Thursday that he had edited the entry on Wikipedia on subprime mortgages to change all mentions of "credit crisis" to "credit liquidity."

"The fundamentals of the U.S. economy are strong," the president explained during a break between vacations and Wikipedia entries. "The fundamental question is, 'Is there enough liquidity in our system? And I think we have answered that emphatically with my entry on Wikipedia.’"

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson also tried to strike a reassuring tone in his own entry on Wikipedia, editing out all references to foreclosures and late payments, especially among people with spotty credit histories.

"We're really focused on the subprime market, and we're really focused on the homeowners -- mortgage holders -- who are in danger of losing their homes," Paulson said. The administration "is thinking through options on Wikipedia to address that segment of the market," he added.

White House spokesman Tony Snow pointed out the White House isn’t the first powerful entity to edit information on Wikipedia.

Last year, someone at PepsiCo deleted several paragraphs of the Pepsi entry that focused on its detrimental health effects. In 2005, someone using a computer at Diebold deleted paragraphs that criticized the company's electronic voting machines.

That same year, someone inside Wal-Mart Stores changed an entry about employee compensation.

Snow said the White House was simply "following the lead of some of the most successful business minds in the country when it came to crisis management."

A spokesman for the Department of Defense, which is organizing the White House’s rewrite effort, said that although the revisions have come from the oval office, and some 80,000 government computers are being employed for the all-out editing blitz, "this historical change is really coming from the American public because this is what they want to hear."

"We are here to do the people’s work and that’s just what we are doing," noted the spokesman.

Paulson urged patience among Wikipedia readers, saying it was going to take the government team some time to get all the editing revisions right as they reassess their appetite for risk in trying to manipulate the financial markets.

'I think what the American people need to understand is these things take a while to play out."

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, meanwhile, urged Wikipedia to allow the White House use of "all its available tools" so the credit crisis and home mortgage mess don't undermine the national economy.

Dodd said he welcomed the White House's steps thus far to deal with the credit problems. In addition to injecting billions of edits into the Wikipedia system, the White House last week added an entry that sliced the Fed’s discount rate -- the rate it charges banks for direct loans -- to negative 3.75 percent, meaning that the Fed will now be paying banks to borrow money.

"We’re not sure where the money is going to come from. We’ll just let Wikipedia sort that one out," Paulson said.

White House officials also have been urging banks to borrow from the Fed's so-called Wikipedia window, trying to remove a stigma that it is a place for banks to turn to only in times of emergency or last resort.

Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, participated in a conference call last Friday with major investment banking firms. He suggested use of the Wikipedia window would be viewed as a sign of strength.

After a five-year boom, the housing market turned to bust last year. The combination of higher interest rates and weaker home values have put many homeowners, especially those with higher-risk subprime mortgages, in financial hardship. Mounting defaults have forced some lenders out of business. Credit problems have spread to other borrowers. Nervous lenders have tightened standards, making it harder for individuals and companies to obtain credit -- the lifeblood of the economy.

But Paulson said he is confident that in Wikipedia the government has found a new tool that is not subject to the whims of the marketplace, but only those of the Web site’s many contributors.

"This is something that, with a little bit of work and a lot of whimsical entries, we should be able to manage into a soft literary landing," said the treasury secretary.

Meanwhile the Pentagon said it had recovered almost $999,000 of taxpayer money by editing an entry on Wikipedia to say that it had paid $1, and not nearly $1 million, for two metal washers worth 34 cents from the plumbing and electrical firm C&D Distributors.

"This isn’t the perfect way of doing business," said a Pentagon spokesman, "but you go to economic war with the army you have."

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“Big Brother – We are watching YOU!”