Wikipedia, the largest reference work on the Internet, has made an unprecedented admission that its site is being manipulated by paid spin doctors and "sock puppets" using false online identities to change entries.
A long statement from the Wikimedia Foundation, the charitable organisation that oversees the sixth largest site on the web, revealed that some 250 sock puppets have been "blocked or banned" after being found to have carried out "non-neutral editing" of Wikipedia pages.
But in the statement, Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, acknowledged that it had been the victim of concerted activity in falsifying pages for commercial and other motives. "It looks like a number of user accounts - perhaps as many as several hundred - may have been paid to write articles on Wikipedia promoting organizations or products," she said, "and have been violating numerous site policies and guidelines, including prohibitions against sock puppetry and undisclosed conflicts of interest"
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