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  See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
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  [35]John Borland
  [36]Business
  Aug 14, 2007 12:00 PM

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign

  CalTech graduate student Virgil Griffith built a search tool that
  traces IP addresses of those who make Wikipedia changes.

  (BUTTON) Save
  (BUTTON) Save

  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.

  [37]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
  [38]Wikipedia Scanner yourself, then [39]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 [40]deleting long
  paragraphs [41]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.
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  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, [46]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 [47]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 CIA's net address, for example, have been busy -- but with
  little that would indicate their place of apparent employment, or a
  particular bias.

  One [48]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 CIA 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 nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not
  respond to e-mail and telephone inquiries Monday.

  [49]Diebold Loses Key Copyright Case

  [50]The Wikipedia FAQK

  [51]Wikipedia Tightens the Reins

  [52]Wikipedia Faces Growing Pains

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