“Leper ship” company Trafigura caught cleaning up Wikipedia

The press office of Trafigura, the company which leased the leper ship Probo Koala at the time it dumped 500 tons of toxic waste in Ivory Coast last year, was caught red-handed “cleaning up” the Dutch Wikipedia entry about the ship. Specifically, it removed the sentence that said the ship had even transported toxic waste, and added a sentence claiming that the company had done nothing wrong, according to Dutch daily De Volkskrant (Dutch). Trafigura also used sock puppets to try and make further changes, after which the page was temporarily blocked from further editing.

Wikipedia itself is not adverse to poisining — the discourse that is. Editor Tom Ordelman said to De Volkskrant: “It is unusual […] to interfere with an entry about yourself, but in reality it happens a lot.” I guess “unusual” is Wiki Admin Speak for “verboten!”.

(Via: FEMBusiness.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 3:01 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: environment, Wikipedia