Wikipedia - That Vulgar Online Encyclopedia That Changed the Internet

Have a look at the picture attached to the article. Do you see the first line of the Wikipedia article? Well, I saw this one today when I was searching for Roald Dahl on Wikipedia in order to find more information about the new Google doodle recently published by the Mountain View company. We all know Wikipedia is open source but this is not necessarily a good thing. As you probably heard, everybody is able to edit the articles published on Wikipedia by pressing the 'Edit' button appearing next to the entries. But some of the consumers use this feature as a way to advertise a product or just to spam the service and damage its image.

This picture is just one piece of evidence but there is no way to avoid these problems as Wikipedia is a service based 100 percent on the users' help. However, the above line was quickly removed from the page by another user who was probably thinking that Wikipedia is about information and not for people like the one who edited the article.

Although I'm not sure if this edit can be included in the 'Vandalism' category, Wikipedia's guidelines are quite clear in this matter. "Vandalism is any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia. Committing blatant vandalism, however, is a violation of Wikipedia policy; once it is spotted it should be dealt with accordingly-if you cannot deal with it yourself, you can seek help from others."

Some weeks ago, a revolutionary tool which is able to identify the people who edit the Wikipedia articles discovered that even the FBI, the CIA and several other organizations turn to the official page of the encyclopedia to edit the articles and to remove several lines from the entries.