BBC's flagrant hypocrisy over Wiki edits – Telegraph Blogs

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Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter as HolySmoke. His latest book is The Fix: How addiction is taking over your world. He also writes about classical music for The Spectator.

BBC's flagrant hypocrisy over Wiki edits

The BBC website was crowing mightily yesterday about evidence suggesting that the CIA was involved in editing Wikipedia entries.


Wikipedia allows users to write their own definitions

But what the report didn't mention of course is that the BBC also seems to have been heavily involved in editing Wikipedia entries. Indeed, someone using a BBC computer even removed a Wikipedia reference to the BBC censoring subjects it finds unpalatable.

This comical, glorious hypocrisy has been uncovered by the excellent Biased BBCÂ website. This week, it claimed that "people at the BBC" (ie, using BBC computers) had made vast numbers of edits to Wikipedia entries. This page logs the alleged edits, complete with telltale bbc.co.uk domain details.

One of these edits involved changing a reference to Palestinian "terrorists" to "freedom fighters". Here is the Wikipedia page showing the edits. Interestingly, Nick Reynolds,Â a formerÂ editorial policy adviser for the BBC, admits in the Biased BBC blog comments that this was a silly thing to do.

But here's my favourite example. Another edit traced to a BBC computer removed references to BBC bias from a Wikipedia entry. Here is the relevant page, showing pre- and post-edit versions.

Missing from the new version is a reference to the BBC being "out of touch with large swathes of the public and Â… guilty of self-censoring subjects that the corporation finds unpalatable". That's one newspaper's take on the Bridcut report, commissioned by the BBC.

Anyway, although the Biased BBCÂ allegations were already posted yesterday, with comments from a BBC executive, BBC News online neglected to mention the corporation's embarrassing track record when it wrote its story about the CIA. Yet its report found room for plenty of other examples of surreptitious Wiki editing. Funny, that.

Do you think I can slip in a quick Wikipedia reference to this scandal before someone at the BBC edits it out again?

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