Sony caught editing Halo 3 Wikipedia entry

Martin Brinkmann
Sep 10, 2007
Updated • Dec 26, 2012
Internet
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3

Oh Sony, when will you learn that manipulating the public will not be taken lightly when it becomes public. This time, someone from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe's studios in Liverpool was caught adding a sentence to the Halo 3 entry on Wikipedia. The person in question added the sentence 'Although it won't look any better than Halo 2' to the game description which has been removed after discovery.

The manipulation was discovered using the highly acclaimed Wikiscanner which is a searchable database for all Wikipedia edits that have been made.

One has to ask if this was the doings of an individual or sanctioned by Sony and I would guess that it was done by an individual. By using an IP assigned to Sony however Sony is to blaim, again. Real Manipulation looks different and is not done from company computers at all, at least I suppose that is the case.

You hire someone far away or use your home computer with dynamic IPs or proxies to manipulate which is much harder to spot. This time it looks just like the misstep of a single employee. It nevertheless falls back on Sony as the company network was used to manipulate the entry on Wikipedia. No one would probably have made the connection in first place if the employee would have used a home computer instead.

Update: Wikiscanner seems still online but I can't really say anything about how accurate the information are right now. Version 2 of the online service is announced on the page but not available yet, and the preview links to a non-working page. The WikiScanner Classic link too leads no where, which leaves the Poor Man's Check User for Wikipedia, beaver scope and the potential sockpuppetry options as the only ones working on the site.

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Comments

  1. Mat said on September 10, 2007 at 9:29 pm
    Reply

    SONY’S GOING DOWN.
    Woohoo.

  2. TJ said on September 10, 2007 at 8:18 pm
    Reply

    Thats hilarious…. I love wikipedia

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