VS 

The good ole’ folks over at Wikipedia recently uncovered that an employee from Daimler AG (the company that owns Mercedes-Benz) deleted information from a page about the German company. This particular page stated that Daimler received the “Worst EU Lobbying Award” for delaying binding CO2 reduction targets. How can Wikipedia be so sure that the culprit was someone from Daimler? The IP address of the “deleter” belonged to the company.

Apparently, this isn’t the first incident involving Daimler. In 2005 and 2006, someone using another Daimler-owned IP address made a total of 24 changes to a Wikipedia article related to the company’s relationship with the Nazis. The user erased passages which stated that war prisoners and slave laborers – during World War II – worked at an aircraft engine production facility built by Daimler-Benz, recognized at the time as a “model National Socialist company”. The user also deleted other similar items, but I think you get the overall point.

Daimler claims that the employee acted independently, while Wikipedia will struggle to prove otherwise. I’m sure many companies have done and would do the same thing to save their brand image. But if they’re going to do it, they need to make sure they don’t get busted!

[Source: Spiegel Online]

This entry was posted on March 19, 2012 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Rants. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Censorship, Daimler, German Wikipedia Page, Transparency, Transparency in the Automotive Industry, Wikipedia