For the Wikiscanner Report, I took a closer look at the Google page, which resulted in some very interesting findings.
What are they changing? As I scanned edit by edit, the changes ranged from spelling mistakes & grammatical changes to vandalism. There were financial edits that were made to better represent the company, and date edits such as replacing “recently” with the actual date “June, 21, 2005,” for more accuracy. There was a debate between labeling Google as Google, Inc or Google, LTD…which is currently Google, Inc. Obviously the most interesting edits were those of vandalism that I came across and could actually see highlighted. Here are some listed below, but there were many more I discovered and some were very inappropriate.
1. As of march 2006, google has announced that it will be officially taking over the world. Additionally, Google has also recently formed a partnership with [[Sun Microsystems]] to help share
2. Poop
3. U Suck
4. COW COW COW COW COW COW COW COW COW COW COW COW COW COW ……………………………………………… 5. Google is a big Scammer in U.S. It’s ADWORD and ADSENSE programs require the participant to pay US$50 for exmaination fee and run the ADWORD with US1000 per month expenditure in order to qualify for passing the scam examination and get the phony professional certifcate.”’
6. The Google Corporation is a large evil Company bent on takimg over the world
Why are the editing? What does this mean? Overall I think the edits were making the Google page more accurate, providing real facts in numbers, dates, and information, for example there was a line that compared Google Maps to Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, and this was edited to say that Google Earth should actually be the comparison to Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, not Maps. There were a ton of links added in as edits also, for example there was a link added for Google Watch. As I mentioned above, there was a ton of vandalism, which I guess is expected for a company with so many competitors and users. International edits saying that uk.ask.com was better than Google. Oh, and there was a discussion over the correct wording for the phrase “Don”t Be Evil!”
How often? These changes were made every other minute, day, week…there was a total of close to 3000 edits on the wikiscanner, but all of the edits in the wikiscanner were mainly from 2005 and 2006, why is that? Why did it not have the most recent edits shown? I then went to the Google page in wikipedia and looked at the history, which showed recent edits, and there was an additional 500+. Is there a benchmark for how many edits is considered normal for an article in wikipedia?
Who is editing? I found that there was a range of edits from individuals obviously trying to vandalize the Google article to university IP addresses, to communication company IP address, such as Comcast, Road Runner, Verizon…etc. There were also a lot of international IP addresses from Hong Kong, China, and the UK. And then I am sure a majority of edits were from within Google as well.
Are the abiding by the rules? There are definitely contributors editing and breaking some of the articles policies, such as:
The Vandalism alone breaks all of these rules and there was a ton of vandalism!
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