Toronto Star Denies Hacking Rob Ford's Wikipedia Page

Toronto City Councillor and mayoral candidate Rob Ford's in the news. He's apparently at the center of a Wikipedia "contributor" hacking allegations scandal. Ford's Wikipedia page was fixed so that readers who clicked his campaign link were sent to satirical site instead. An alert reader noticed, and checked who last edited Ford's entry, and traced the IP back to the Toronto Star. I probably wouldn't have even noticed, but Kathy Shaidle links to her hubby Blazing Cat Fur, "Toronto Star Linked To "Edits" of Rob Ford Wikipedia Page." And see also Toronto Sun, "Toronto Star Denies Ford Wikipedia Change":

The anonymous poster who traced a Wikipedia edit on Rob Ford to the Toronto Star’s corporate parent says he was just trying to get himself up to speed on the civic election.

“I was reading through some of the Wikipedia entries on the candidates because I wanted to get informed about the election,” ES, who didn’t want his name used, said in an interview.

The Star denied the IP address that made the edit is associated to the newspaper.

ES said he was surfing about on Aug. 5 when he noticed a link on mayoral candidate Rob Ford’s Wikipedia entry, purporting to be “Rob Ford’s Personal Blog,” was actually a satirical website.

“It was basically set up to make fun of him,” ES said.

“It is supposed to be official links related to Rob Ford,” he said. “If you look at other people’s Wiki pages, it generally doesn’t list satire pages as official blog sites. It kind of struck a red flag for me. I was a little concerned because I don’t want to see that for any candidate.”

ES deleted the link, only the second time he’s ever contributed to a Wikipedia article and then checked the history of who had added it to find the IP address. A check of that address showed it was related to the Star, although a spokesman for the newspaper denied any involvement.

“It is inaccurate, these allegations that we are editing Rob Ford’s Wikipedia page,” Bob Hepburn said.

Instead, Hepburn said the address is used by several other publications owned by Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd., including Sing Tao, Metro and the Metroland newspapers.

“We’re trying to track it down, where specifically it came from,” Hepburn said. “It may be impossible given the number of publications.

“We don’t have a policy that firm but we would frown heavily on people going in and changing things in Wikipedia,” he said.

Wikipedia describes itself as “the free dictionary that anyone can edit.” But while it’s assembled from largely anonymous contributors, every edit can be tracked on the site.

There's a history there, it turns out. Ford plans to sue the Star for stories published earlier.

But be sure to check Blazing's post.