Link by Link - Don’t Like Palin’s Wikipedia Story? Change It

As it happens I was looking at the edit history for the Sarah Palin article a few days ago. A more complete (dare I say less biased) article would have mentioned that no sooner had this particular individual started making flattering edits to the article, other people also started making unflattering edits to the article. Current edit wars include whether to mention the fact that she smoked weed, or to link to the dailykos theory that her youngest son is actually her grandson.

Are they linked to the Obama campaign? Who knows? Realistically it's no surprise that people are going to attempt to use wikipedia as a campaign tool, and the kind of people with enough political motivation and free time to edit wikipedia for their candidate's benefit are exactly the same people with enough political motivation and free time to be campaign volunteers.

Another recent controversy I noticed was on the William Ayers article. I went there the other day to try and get some facts on the Obama-Ayers connection, only to find that there was no mention of Obama in the Ayers article at all, and of course a huge debate in the comments about whether it's worth mentioning. Going back there again today I find that the Obama-Ayers connection is not only mentioned but has been spun off into its own article.

Political power has always revolved around shaping the flow of information.

The only thing that has changed is the medium.