Scanner Tracks Who’s Changing What on Wikipedia, from NPR

See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign, from Wired

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.

Alarmingly, but I suppose not surprisingly, he’s found clearly politically- and marketing-motivated edits, and big ones. The interesting questions come at the end of the NPR piece: Will this scare institutions off from making these self-serving edits? Or simply force them to do it more covertly? Will this improve or devalue Wikipedia over time?