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?
1 Comment
Lori
One interesting underlying assumption that underlies all of these revelatory actions and articles surrounding who adds information to Wikipedia is the assumption that if someone clearly has a connection that could create a slanted viewpoint they will undoubtedly be engaging in some kind of “dirty marketeering.” It is quite possible for someone with a bias (we all have one) to state the facts. Venues like Wikipedia are, in fact, geered toward insuring that *everyone* has the ability to set the record straight if the facts are incorrect. Frankly, the CIA has a better set of resources for providing a straightforward article about the CIA than do most other people. Why assume the article *must* be biased because the information came from someone that works there?
Although it is undoubtedly very useful to know where information originated, articles like this tend to inflame people’s “There, Wikipedia *must* be full of garbage!” tendencies.
Anyway, some of my best friends work for the CIA, lol.