Interesting revelations from Reuters that CIA and FBI computers edited entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on such hot topics as the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison.

The changes were picked up using the program WikiScanner and they might be in breach of Wikipedia's guidelines that seek to make the online encyclopaedia a completely neutral and reliable source.

Mind you, the guidelines make clear that merely having a conflict of interest doesn't stop you from making or changing an entry and that you just need to be mindful of your position. Yeah right! The CIA was really mindful when it changed the casualty figures for the Iraq war, as was the FBI when it removed the aerial and satellite images of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The BloggingStocks blog suggests it's probably no big deal when vested interests.

That may be, but the problem seems to be much more complicated than that. The temptation to rewrite history is all too much for multinational companies and political parties, reports The Independent on Sunday.

Examples include ExxonMobil changing details about the exxon valdez oil spill of 1989, with an allegation that the company "has not yet paid the $5 billion in spill damages it owes to the 32,000 Alaskan fishermen" being replaced with references to the funds the company has paid out, Dell removing a passage about how the company out-sourced its support divisions overseas and someone at Rupert Murdoch's News International removing suggestions that the News of the World's anti-paedophile was hypocritical when the paper published semi-nude photos of models as young as 16.