According to the website http://www.wikipedia.org, Wikipedia is "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, featuring 7.9 million articles in 253 languages." The open format of the website allows visitors to edit articles, which has drawn criticism from traditional encyclopedia editors and the media as to the reliability of the information published.

On August 14, 2007, news broke on Wired.com that Virgil Griffith, a computer science graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, created an application called WikiScanner that tracks edits made to Wikipedia articles. Griffith's tool exposed the IP addresses of employees at several corporations who were making edits to not only their own company's page(s), but also those of competitors. Just a few of the corporations listed include Exxon Mobil, Apple, Microsoft, and Wal-Mart.

The following chart provides the overall sentiment breakdown of the blogosphere about the corporate editing of Wikipedia for the period from 08/15/2007 to 08/21/2007:

Bloggers spoke predominantly negatively about corporate editing of Wikipedia, at 67% of all conversations. Less than 5% of bloggers had anything positive to say this week, and the remaining 29% remained neutral.

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