This is another interesting article to check out. Ladit Peter-Rhaina Gwokto
don't take me to task. Usual disclaimers apply. Semei
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Politics : Online Rights
See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
By John Borland 08.14.07 | 2:00 AM
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 long standing 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 CIA 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
CEO'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
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.
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