The New York Times (free registration required) has an interesting story on how some corporations have tried to edit articles on wikipedia

Last year, someone at PepsiCo deleted several paragraphs of the Pepsi entry that focused on its detrimental health effects. In 2005, someone using a computer at Diebold deleted paragraphs that criticized the company’s electronic voting machines. That same year, someone inside Wal-Mart Stores changed an entry about employee compensation.

Fortunately as the article explains now there is one more tool to keep track of who, when and how information is misused. By going on the WikiScanner site anybody can look for changes made from a corporate network. For instance here is a list of all the things that were changed by people within the Wal-Mart company.

The first thing that comes to mind is of unethical employees that change the information to their company advantage (or disadvantage). Interestingly enough if you spend some time on the site, you will notice that many people from within the same company will edit different types of articles (i.e.: science, geography, history, etc.) that have nothing to do with the company.

So now in order to protect themselves, companies are introducing policies for their employees where they are required to introduce themselves if they write about the company online.

How can you not love user generated content?