Daniel Radcliffe is a teenage porn star, Tony Blair had posters of Adolf Hitler on his bedroom wall when he was a teenager, and yeah, Robbie Williams “. . . makes his money by eating domestic pets in pubs in and around Stoke.” Where would you find such hilarious statements? On Wikipedia, of course. Although such vandalism is removed within minutes from the site by its community of over a thousand editors, you might happen to check a particular entry just when such bizarre things have been posted.

Harmless online entertainment, or another means for mudslinging…Who knows?

Wikipedia is considered by its loyalists to be a massive repository of online information that can be updated in an instant. A few have found a new role for this increasingly popular site, an online means for throwing eggs. Wikipedia has become a political battleground in the U.S. with politicians’ aides being accused of “polishing” articles about their bosses and vandalizing those about their opponents.

Such partisan editors were traced through their computers’ IP addresses which were found to belong to Senate machines. In one such case of vandalism, the Republican Senator, Tom Coburn was falsely accused of being voted "most annoying senator". It was also reported that Senator Joe Biden’s staff removed a paragraph on an alleged plagiarism scandal and also changed the section on his 2008 Presidential campaign “to read very positively.”

The entry on British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, gets changed around twenty times each day only to add ridiculous accusations which are removed promptly by Wikipedia editors. This led Wikipedia to investigate whether any of these postings could be traced back to the House of Commons or not, a repeat of what is happening across the Atlantic.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, recently told Times Online: "If what you’re after is 'who won the World Cup in 1986, it’s going to be fine – no problem. If you want to know something a little more esoteric, or something that’s going to be controversial, you should probably use a second reference – at least."

The next time you read a Wikipedia article accusing your state senator of having been involved in a sex scandal in his youth, remember it’s Wikipedia, so such news needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

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• Wikipedia - Can it be trusted ?