The Institute for Cultural Diplomacy

by Henry Farrell on March 27, 2013

Tomorrow, as a belated contribution to the Real Utopias seminar, I’ll be posting a piece which talks about manipulation of the Wikipedia process. As soon as I’d finished writing, I turned to Twitter, to read this interesting story by Benjamin Mako Hill about his experiences with the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (an organization that I only know of because they relentlessly spam me with unsolicited emails about tedious-sounding events – apparently it is effectively impossible to get off their mailing list). In any event, it appears that some mysterious individual called icd_berlin created a Wikipedia page on the Berlin based Institute, which was then built up by a series of anonymous contributors with Berlin IP addresses. Critical comments about their intern policy were removed (again by an individual with a Berlin IP address). And then things get worse …

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