Now that Wikipedia has found it appropriate to excise the error riddled entry slandering your humble blogger—who was, thanks to nameless dilettantes of unknown employ, chalked up as an antisemite and Holocaust denier—I am wishing for a pony, namely the demise of the online propaganda and slander database masquerading as an encyclopedia. As it turns out, and I reported here late last week, Wikipedia is a magnet for the CIA and FBI, tasked with revising history and, no doubt as well, slamming the opposition, an effort with a long and sordid history.

I failed to mention, however, that Wikipedia is not only a magnet for CIA and FBI hacks, but for multinational corporations as well. “Among those [Virgil Griffith, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology] alleges have been updating their entries are Wal-Mart, the world’s largest grocer, AstraZeneca, the drugs giant, Britain’s Labour Party, the CIA and the Vatican,” reports Times Online. “In one example he gives, a computer linked to an IP address registered to the Dow Chemical company is seen to have deleted a passage on the Bhopal chemical disaster of 1984, which occurred at a plant operated by Union Carbide, now a wholly-owned Dow subsidiary.”

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Of course, Dow does not want you to know about this “disaster,” often characterized as the “Hiroshima of the Chemical Industry,” responsible for killing 20,000 people and inflicting an estimated 120,000 survivors with chronic and debilitating, multi-systemic gas related ailments. Not only has Dow expunged the facts on Wikipedia, but has “openly lied to shareholders about the company’s legal liabilities in Bhopal,” according to CorpWatch. “While babies in Bhopal are born with defects and drink breast milk laced with toxins, in the US a new generation has just begun to learn of the gas leak, the ongoing contamination, and their effects,” however, this information will not be gleaned from Wikipedia. It should be noted that Dow refuses to provide medical rehabilitation and economic reparations for the victims, a standard business practice for multinational corporations.

In addition, “ExxonMobil, the US oil giant, made sweeping changes to an entry on the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. A claim that the company ‘has not yet paid the $5 billion in spill damages it owes to the 32,000 Alaskan fishermen’ is deleted and replaced with references to the funds the company has paid out,” and does not intend to ever pay out, as environmental pollution is simply a by-product of doing business and the responsibility for cleaning up the mess, of course, falls to the American people. Don’t expect them to learn about ExxonMobil’s crimes on Wikipedia.

“A web surfer using a machine on Wal-Mart’s network has amended a passage on the rates that the retailer pays its employees—to the benefit of the world’s largest retailer” and a “computer registered to Disney, the media giant, was used to delete a reference to criticism of the use of Digital Rights Management software, used by the group to safeguard digital media from piracy.” AstraZeneca, the pharm giant, deleted a reference to Seroquel, a drug which allegedly made teenagers “more likely to think about harming or killing themselves,” and this deletion was attributed to “a user of a computer registered to the drug company” (consider the following “revision” posted at Wikipedia).

Not only have multinational corporations and the CIA and FBI jumped on the revisionist history bandwagon, but so have religious entities. “Individuals using computers registered to the Vatican have amended entries on Roman Catholic saints and Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein…. A computer linked to the Church of Scientology’s network was used to delete references to links between it and a group dubbed the ‘Cult Awareness Network,’” reports the Times Online.

“Massaging Wikipedia entries has become a well-established phenomenon as the reach of the world’s most popular online reference work has become apparent,” especially if there are official enemies to attack or crimes to be sanitized. “Last year the site was transformed into a political battleground in the US, with politicians’ aides accused of ‘vandalizing’ entries on opposition figures,” sort of a cyber version of dirty tricks, legendary behavior for both the FBI and CIA, long tasked with taking out the opposition. In a way, though, victims of such efforts may consider themselves lucky, as the CIA has dealt with official enemies in other countries more severely, viz., they are often assassinated. Of course, some claim the CIA and the FBI have engaged likewise tactics here, most notably in regard to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Finally, “in a signal of how tempting it can be for interested parties to amend articles, Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder, himself ran into controversy in 2005, when he admitted editing his own Wikipedia entry.”

Figures.