From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 15, 2007 5:44:06 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Fwd: See Who's Editing Wikipedia -- Diebold, the C.I.A., a
Campaign
Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL.com.
From: "Jim S." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: August 15, 2007 4:10:54 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: See Who's Editing Wikipedia -- Diebold, the C.I.A., a
Campaign
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http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/
wiki_tracker
*See Who's Editing Wikipedia -- Diebold, the C.I.A., a Campaign*
By John Borland Email 08.14.07 | 2:00 a.m.
[CalTech graduate student Virgil Griffith built a search tool that
traces IP
addresses of those who make Wikipedia changes. Photo: Jake Appelbaum]
On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15
paragraphs from an
article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire
section critical
of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically
leave behind
digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as
the location
of the computer used to make the edits.
In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the
corporate
offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new
data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia
entries to their
corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data
behind
longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have
surfaced only
piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.
Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and
neural-systems
graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable
database that ties
millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those
edits
apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on
who owns the
associated block of internet IP addresses.
Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been
editing their
own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know
whether big
companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly
self-interested vein.
"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate
it," he says with
a grin.
This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia
policies and
(mostly) publicly available information.
The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps
detailed logs of
all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by
their user name,
but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.
Share Your Sleuthing!
Cornered any companies polishing up their Wikipedia entries?
Spotted any
government spooks rewriting history? Try Virgil Griffith's
Wikipedia Scanner
yourself, then submit your finds and vote on other readers'
discoveries here.
The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia,
including
records of all these changes.
Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-
based records
of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP
addresses with
public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private
domain-name
data provided by IP2Location.com.
The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million
organizations or individuals ranging from the C.I.A. to Microsoft to
Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at
their
organization's net address has made.
Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either
adding positive,
press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of
critical
material.
Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the
latter, with
someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long
paragraphs detailing
the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting
machines, and
information about the company's C.E.O.'s fund-raising for President
Bush.
The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another
Wikipedia
contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop
removing content from
Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."
A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter
but could not
comment by press time.
Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that
burnish the
company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in,
changing a
line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note
that it pays
nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves
activist criticism
on community impact intact, while citing a "definitive" study
showing Wal-Mart
raised the total number of jobs in a community.
As has been previously reported, politician's offices are heavy
users of the
system. Former Montana Sen. Conrad Burns' office, for example,
apparently
changed one critical paragraph headed "A controversial voice" to "A
voice for
farmers," with predictably image-friendly content following it.
Perhaps interestingly, many of the most apparently self-interested
changes come
from before 2006, when news of the Congressional offices' edits
reached the
headlines. This may indicate a growing sophistication with the
workings of
Wikipedia over time, or even the rise of corporate Wikipedia policies.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told Wired News he was aware of the
new service,
but needed time to experiment with it before commenting.
The vast majority of changes are fairly innocuous, however.
Employees at the
C.I.A.'s net address, for example, have been busy -- but with
little that would
indicate their place of apparent employment, or a particular bias.
One entry on "Black September in Jordan" contains wholesale
additions, with
specific details that read like a popular history book or an
eyewitness' memoir.
Many more are simple copy edits, or additions to local town entries
or school
histories. One C.I.A. entry deals with the details of lyrics sung
in a Buffy the
Vampire Slayer episode.
Griffith says he launched the project hoping to find scandals,
particularly at
obvious targets such as companies like Halliburton. But there's a
more practical
goal, too: By exposing the anonymous edits that companies such as
drugs and big
pharmaceutical companies make in entries that affect their
businesses, it could
help experts check up on the changes and make sure they're
accurate, he says.
For now, he has just scratched the surface of the database of
millions of
entries. But he's putting it online so others can look too.
The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not
respond to
e-mail and telephone inquiries Monday.
---- Msg sent via CWNet - http://www.cwnet.com/
