Wikipedia’s content is open for public, anonymous revision. The website’s conflict of interest policy states persons are not allowed to make edits to pages they are associated with.
On Western's Wikipedia page, the last two edits were on the notable alumni page on April 20 from an IP address with no username.
The revision history page also shows that, on average, the Western page is revised every 3.85 days, and that 371 users have edited the page.
Due to the relative anonymity on the site, it is difficult to know the user’s affiliations and if there is a potential conflict of interest.
Paul Cocke, director of University Communications, had no comment in regards to who edits Western’s Wikipedia page at this time.
A scanner created to prevent bias edits from being made showed IP addresses from several pages coming from universities editing their own page, said Ryan Dellolio, a Web program manager at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Dellolio is an avid Wikipedia contributor who was on a recent BlogTalkRadio session discussing universities roles within Wikipedia.
The scanner was created in 2007 at the California Institute of Technology to determine the source of edits from IP addresses according to creator Virgil Griffith’s WikiScanner website.
Dellolio said comments or additions to many articles are removed almost daily because they seem like there coming from inside an institution.
Western’s page contains more than 4,500 words. The average size of a Wikipedia article is about 590 words.
“It is a very thorough and positive page,” Western librarian Paul Piper said. “The budget problem Western is having is certainly something that could be mentioned. But since it hasn’t been, one can assume either somebody put it in and it was taken out or the page is being carefully constructed.”
Piper is in the process of writing a book about the social aspects and impacts Wikipedia has had.
“This is the largest collaborative project that has occurred in humanity,” Piper said.
Since Wikipedia allows the public to edit different pages, the website has behavioral guidelines to provide accurate information.
According to these policies, the website is not a vanity press or a forum for advertising.
The main purpose of Wikipedia is to produce a neutral, reliably-sourced articles.
LiAnna Davis, communications associate at the Wikimedia Foundation’s Public Policy Initiative, said on the BlogTalkRadio session that working in the communication office at a university “gives you a certain amount of bias about the topic of your university, and you should not be editing their Wikipedia page.”
Davis said Wikipedia encourages universities to state their affiliation with their school. Some administrators make notes in the talk page of each article, which is a discussion forum regarding the content of each page, to see if any incorrect information has been provided.
Because Wikipedia is the fifth-most visited site in the world, Davis said during the BlogTalkRadio session, keeping track of biased edits is getting increasingly difficult.
Piper agreed.
“A lot of articles tend to be biased,” he said. “Chances are if you don’t know a lot about a particular subject, you aren’t going to write about it.”
