This story at the BBC says that there’s evidence of Internet addresses at the CIA have been editing content about Iranian politicians, among other things, to make them more favourable to US versions of events. The report also says the Vatican seem to have been editing entries about Gerry Adams, the Irish Republican leader.

Why would anyone be surprised that this is the case? Open source software development leads to lots of people debugging code and generally making it better, of course. But why would people have the same high ideals when it comes to other sorts of content? Of course vested interests come into play. That ‘s easy to sniff out when it’s the entry about a company like Burger King, or Agency.com, but it’s a lot harder when it’s political.

Again, the question of how reliable user generated content can ever be rears its head. In time, we will need some kind of classification system or provenance checking that means we can tell which street maps were made by the public, and which encyclopedias were written by spooks.