The Russian government has reportedly been caught editing a Wikipedia page relating to crashed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 and removing references to Russian involvement.
The Telegraph reports that a Russian-language Wikipedia page about civil aviation accidents was edited from within the government-run All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company.
Статья в Википедии Список авиационных катастроф в гражданской авиации была отредактирована ВГТРК http://t.co/peZ60q07Fj
— Госправки (@RuGovEdits) July 18, 2014
The user wrote that “the plane [flight MH17] was shot down by Ukrainian soldiers”.
That replaced an entry written just an hour earlier that said the plane had been shot down by “terrorists of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic with Buk system missiles, which the terrorists received from the Russian Federation.”
The edits were uncovered by @RuGovEdits, a Twitter bot that automatically tweets every time Wikipedia is edited from a computer with a Russian government IP address.
An IP address is a unique number related to certain computers or networks.
All edits made to Wikipedia are permanently logged along with the editor’s username and IP address.
The move is a stark reminder to brands and organisations that the web is a difficult beast to control, and attempts to change records of past events is getting harder than ever. It also indicates just how revealing these little Wikipedia edit twitterbots can be.