BP's Wikiality

By Kevin Robinson in Miscellaneous on Aug 28, 2007 2:00PM

In a move a la Stephen Colbert, a computer registered to the multinational energy corporation tried to spiff up its Wikipedia entry late last week, coinciding with the announcement that it will not increase discharges of ammonia and suspended solids into Lake Michigan from the planned expansion of its Whiting, Ind., refinery.

According to the record of edits on Wikipedia, on August 23, a computer at the IP address 63.84.4.0, registered to BP Amoco, added the corporation's announcement to the entry. Of course, now that a smarty pants grad student at Cal Tech has built a handy little Wikipedia Scanner — allowing users to search entries to see who is editing them — expect to see more news of anonymous revisions of recent history on the collaborative encyclopedia. Already Fox News, Diebold and Wal-Mart, among others, have been criticized for changing their entries to reflect more positively on themselves.

While there is no evidence that this was a coordinated or planned move — certainly an employee with a sense of company pride could have taken matters into their own hands — it does add a new wrinkle to the drama that has occupied the minds of people who live near the lake recently.

Image via E Pluribus Unum.