We all know that it is easy to modify entries on Wikipedia for our own ends - self-promotion, harm a competitor, ride a hobby horse - and that regardless of all the number of editors being vigilantes about errors some stuff sticks, With a new tool named WikiScanner it is much easier to track the edits to Wikipedia and identify the source by IP number.
In Canada entries about politicians and some topics have been traced back to a variety of government offices in Ottawa.
As an example: "Government computers also edited Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Wikipedia entry 10 times between Aug. 26, 2005, and Aug. 8, 2006. Opposition Leader Stéphane Dion's page was edited four times on Aug. 30, 2004, by someone at a computer traced to the House of Commons, and twice more on Oct. 3, 2006, from a computer inside a Public Works and Government Services office in Gatineau, Que."
The Globe and Mail has this tip: "Canadian government computers used to edit articles can be found by searching for the domain suffix "gc.ca" in the "organization name" field. From there, computers located in the House of Commons have the IP address range of 192.197.82.0 to 192.197.82.255, which was verified using commonly available WHOIS searches."
Is Wikipedia becoming a hub for propaganda? by DAVID GEORGE-COSH, Globe and Mail (Aug 16)
The WikiScanner tool developed by Virgil Griffith is described in this Wired article.
See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign By John Borland, Wired (Aug 14)
How it works: "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."
BBC News was most interested in the instances of edits by the CIA - at least as shown in the headling. There is also the case of the Vatican removing content from a page about the leader of the Irish republican party Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams. Changes have also been traced to corporations, Diebold and Walmart being two.
Wikipedia 'shows CIA page edits' By Jonathan Fildes, BBC News (Aug 15)
Posted by Gwen at August 16, 2007 02:18 PM