Editing Wikipedia entries based around yourself or your company is forbidden by the website. Instead, unhappy parties are encouraged to get in touch with editors and voice concerns about perceived inaccuracies - otherwise it looks a teeny weeny bit like censorship.
And now, thanks to a helpful tool known as Wikiscanner it's possible to track the anonymous edits made by corporations keen to control their image. Two prominent players in the videogame industry have fallen foul of this recently. Last week, a web user whose IP address was within a range registered to EA's Redwood City HQ was caught removing references to founder Trip Hawkins from the company's Wikipedia entry. According to ShackNews:
"The EA Wiki user also removes a reference to Trip Hawkins' founding of the company in the main description of the entry, and cuts a paragraph from the "History" section detailing Hawkins' business plan."
And later:
"Other changes made by the user in the November cleanup focused on clearing out controversy associated with the publisher's business practices. A user at the Redwood City IP removed a line - "The company has also been the subject of criticism, most notably for its business tactics and its employment policy' - from the end of the introductory description of the company."
"Many companies routinely post updates on websites like Wikipedia to ensure accuracy of their own corporate information," claimed an EA spokesperson quoted in Gamesindustry.biz. But where does 'accuracy' become 'propoganda'? And is it NOT accurate that Trip Hawkins founded EA? Trip might have something to say about that.
On Saturday, Gamepolitics.com discovered that America's Entertainment Software Association seems to have been altering the Mod chip entry on Wikipedia to more closely align with its own hardline stance on modding. From the article:
"In one paragraph, someone at ESA deleted a nuanced discussion of mod chip legality, replacing it with a flat assertion that mod chips are illegal.
"Less than a minute later, a lengthy section on the positive uses of mod chips was deleted, as was a notation that the US Supreme Court has not yet dealt with the DMCA.
"Finally, a sentence stating that mod chips are legal in Australia was removed."
Of course, mod chips aren't just about pirating - they also facilitate the vibrant 'homebrew' community of coders who create their own games for major consoles. But not according to the alleged ESA version of the mod chip page.
This should remind anyone who's read 1984 of Winston Smith's job within the Ministry of Information, constantly re-writing historical documents to reflect the changing doctrines of the obsessively controlling government.
The Thought Police are looming.
