The Pope may have just launched a Facebook app, but he's got nothing on the tech savvy Church of Scientology: Wikipedia members posting from Scientology domain IP addresses have just been banned from editing Wikipedia posts after the free encyclopedia website discovered they were using exceptional means to give the church favorable coverage. A big no-no in aiming-to-be-neutral Wikiland.
One Wikipedia administrator told "The Register," an online tech publication, that "policing edits from Scientology machines has been particularly difficult because myriad editors sit behind a small number of IPs and, for some reason, the address of each editor is constantly changing. This prevents admins from determining whether a single editor is using multiple Wikipedia accounts to game the system."
This sophisticated form of sockpuppetting--creating a fake online persona for the sole purpose of lauding one's self or one's organization, a.k.a. propaganda--goes against Wikipedia's policies as sock puppets erode the site's culture of consensus editing "by creating the illusion of greater support for a viewpoint and evading sanctions."
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