I was looking through our old posts as part of our research in to the SlimVirgin scandal, and I found this old post from 23 April 2006, which in turn links to this comment in Google groups dated 15 April 2006. This is well and truly before Daniel Brandt's first investigations, and before anyone suggested that SlimVirgin might be a secret agent.

Is this just a baseless conspiracy theory or is there something to it? At the time, we all said that the idea of the CIA infiltrating Wikipedia was silly, but nowadays I think that we've seen so many things that have demonstrated just how likely it is. Perhaps we could learn something by looking back at this old post.

There isn't anything to it. If any CIA agents have attempted to infiltrate WP in the past, they have failed. You can tell by the standard of many of the articles they would want to control. Providing an editor has good sources and plays by the book, they can write what they like about the CIA on even the most edited articles and it will stick.

Much as it would help the cause of destroying WP to discover it was riddled with agents of influence, in reality it isn't. The WP warlords such as SV, Jayjg, 172 and so on are simply people with enormous passions for their subjects. The structure of WP means that even the most shrewd infiltrator would likely fail to topple these addicts.