Want to know who played Miracle Max in The Princess Bride? Hit www.wikipedia.org. The information is there and it’s most likely accurate. And if you’re itching to know which year Amelia Earhart disappeared, Wikipedia is probably okay for that too.

That type of information is non-critical: it doesn’t relate to a company’s reputation, a politician’s actions or a country’s human rights record. But for information that may contain an adverse comment on anyone or anything, go somewhere else.

That’s because anyone who doesn’t like what Wikipedia says can simply change it, and while that’s always been well known it has now been confirmed that individuals and organizations are actively editing their wiki profiles.

A Cal Tech grad student by the name of Virgil Griffith created a nifty little database application called Wikipedia Scanner (http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr). It scans the millions of daily Wikipedia edits and then links those to the IP address of the computer that originated the changes. Those addresses can then be tied to the companies that own them.

Griffith has confirmed entries are regularly changed. In just one example, extensive cuts were made to the critical bits of an entry on voting-machine maker Diebold. The computer that made the edits came from Diebold’s office.

Scanner now has information on more than 35 million edits and, while the site’s interface is difficult to navigate, Griffith’s investigative efforts make fascinating reading.

The upshot of this is people looking for information on a new drug, for example, could conceivably start the search at Wikipedia but they must conduct further research. The wiki entry praising the drug’s benefits and dismissing its potential side effects could easily have been written by the drug company itself.

Peter Wolchak