With all of the news about hacked e-mail accounts, it shouldn’t be a big surprise that crowdsourcing interfaces can be manipulated, too. Earlier today, politicking or pranking Russian translators forced a Google Translate mistranslation of four segments — “USA is to blame,” “Russia is to blame,” “Obama is to blame,” and “Medvedev is to blame” into English from Russian (click here to see a screenshot).

Google Переводчик (Translator) made the U.S. and President Obama blameless in the Russian translation (“USA is not to blame,” and “Obama is not to blame”, while placing blame on Russia and President Medvedev. Google quickly fixed the translations, but not before one of our colleagues grabbed this screenshot. The lesson: Crowdsourcing applications need protection against manipulation lest the wisdom of the crowd reflect the politics of its members.