Cyberspace is the latest political battleground, and one of the softest targets in cyberspace is
Wikipedia. Yesterday, while doing some background research on a PAC involved in a campaign here in Wisconsin, I accidentally discovered a malicious attack on the Wikipedia page of Colorado Democratic House candidate Ed Perlmutter. Follow me down for the details.
Wikipedia is the largest reference site on the world, and I use it extensively for political research. Allowing anybody to change and update articles is Wikipedia's greatest strength, but also it's biggest weakness because it invites vandalism of controversial or contentious pages. And few things are more controversial and contentious than politics.
The reason that Wikipedia works at all is that users usually notice problems fairly quickly and fix them. If a page is repeatedly vandalized (insert Foley joke here), it will be protected to prevent further changes. So smart vandals try to make subtle changes that aren't immediately apparent.
When I visited Perlmutter's Wikipedia page everything looked fine. No obvious problems. Then I clicked on the link to Perlmutter's official campaign webpage. As a political junkie, I like to see and compare candidate's sites. But the link didn't take me to Perlmutter's official site. Instead I ended up at this blog set up to attack him.
OK... I figured I must have clicked on the wrong link, and went back and tried again. Same result. So I used Wikipedia's history feature to see if the link had been changed recently. Turns out a user calling himself Rickcd7 had indeed altered the link, and had also deleted a paragraph about recent polls and trends in the race.
It was starting to look like a pattern, so I checked to see if Rickcd7 had edited other Wikipedia pages. The only other page he had altered was that of Perlmutter's Republican opponent, Rick O'Donnell. Rickcd7 had cut and pasted text directly from O'Donnell's campaign website into Wikipedia, which is a big no-no.
Anyway, I corrected the changes on Perlmutter's Wikipedia page, and another user deleted the improper text from O'Donnell's page. I also alerted Perlmutter's campaign that they would be wise to keep an eye on Wikipedia in the future...