Who is doctoring their Wikipedia entries in Switzerland?
If anyone can contribute, people will naturally try to make it sound good. After it came to light two weeks ago that companies, government agencies, NGOs, and political parties are deliberately manipulating entries in the online encyclopedia, the Swiss Sunday press has now taken up this issue as it pertains to Switzerland.
A search engine developed by an American computer science student has been online for two weeks and can be used to easily identify which companies, authorities or political parties are changing Wikipedia entries. It has become known, for example, that Microsoft and the CIA are among the most avid contributors to the Internet encyclopaedia, but that politicians are also purging existing entries about them of unwelcome criticism (see: ). This weekend, the Swiss Sunday press took up the issue of Switzerland. According to NZZ am Sonntag, entries about Swiss Post, Coop, Kuoni and Swiss Radio International, for example, were either rewritten in PR style by the respective offices or passages criticizing the company were removed. The content of entries by private individuals such as Daniel Vasella, Swiss Life boss Rolf Dörig, Marcel Ospel and Roger Köppel was also edited from their company offices. Vasella, for example, suddenly only earned CHF 21 million instead of CHF 44 million as CEO of Novartis and there was no more talk of "self-promotion". When asked by the Sonntagszeitung whether he was aware of the changes, Roger Köppel said that he himself had corrected tendentious or even false information.
