A leak publicised on Reddit has revealed that "Thomson Reuters' terrorism database cites Wikipedia as a source", Motherboard reports.

On Tuesday, a security researcher obtained a mid-2014 copy of Thomson Reuters' controversial financial crime and terrorism database—a huge cache of publicly sourced information used by banks, lawyers, and governments to research individuals and organisations.

Just like your tutor might discover dodgy references in that late-night essay hastily cobbled together, Motherboard has found that a chunk of profiles in the database use Wikipedia as a source.

Using Wikipedia as a source for such claims can be problematic, given how attractive the crowdsourced project has proved to political activists, who frequently edit anonymously.

Motherboard found that more than 15,000 entries in the " World-Check" database referenced wikipedia.org as a source, including 6,500 profiles of political individuals, 624 profiles of people marked as being involved in some form of crime, and 178 profiles of people suspected of involvement in terrorism. Some of the Wikipedia articles concerned were stubs, or had flagged quality problems.

It's a potential worry to people like scholar Taner Akçam, who in 2007 was detained in Canada on the strength of an inaccurate version of his Wikipedia biography designating him a terrorist. And Motherboard notes that a number of well-known charities, activists, and religious institutions were reportedly listed in the database under the "terrorism" label—sometimes in part due to information found on blogs—despite facing no related charges.

However, a Thomson Reuters spokesperson sought to reassure Motherboard that the database:

uses only reliable and reputable public domain sources (such as official sanctions lists, law and regulatory enforcement lists, government sources and trustworthy media publications) for risk-based information or allegations about an individual or entity. We also provide secondary identifying information on individuals, such as dates and place of birth, and this will be similarly verified with reputable and official sources. If blog content appears, it is only as a supporting source for that secondary information, and is clearly identified as such.

(July 1) AK

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• Devouring the web: In the wake of an agreement enabling Google to display "full song lyrics for millions of artists in a 'knowledge box' module at the top of the search page", Caitlin Dewey in the Washington Post likens the impending fate of lyrics websites, who are bound to see massive page view losses as a result, to similar losses reportedly experienced by Wikipedia and others when Google started displaying related content on its own pages. (June 28) AK
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• The lopsided geography of Wikipedia: In The Atlantic, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales discusses Wikipedia's geographical and linguistic imbalance, and barriers to the project's expansion. (June 21) AK
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• Share price collapse: The Times reports on the ongoing share price collapse of Jimmy Wales' "ethical telecoms company", The People's Operator, titling its piece "Investors hang up on Wikipedia founder". (June 15) AK