If you ’ve ever used the on-line cyclopaedia Wikipedia , you might have noticed that editing an article is as comfortable as click the " edit this page " tab , nominate your changes and clicking " save . " But it ’s this ease of editing that ’s both Wikipedia ’s greatest durability and its weakness : Anyone can edit Wikipedia – even anonymously .

Stories often surface about an organization or individual falsify a Wikipedia entry , either maliciously or for the sake of a hard-nosed joke . But limiting people ’s ability to easy edit Wikipedia would conflict on one of its most noted features and what ’s arguably the key to its success .

Wikipedia has a diverseness of prick to deal with malicious editor . The site offers extended tutorials about what it take care for in a good encyclopaedia incoming and how to clean up articles . ManyWikipedians– frequent editors of the cyclopedia – show fierce loyalty to the site , roleplay as its guard dog and correct potentially detrimental edits . Wikipedia keeps a platter of all changes so that a defaced or otherwise unsatisfactory article can easily revert to an older version . The land site also has several characteristic that can be used or requested by Wikipedians , including locking down pages , jam certain user and drooping articles that violate the web site ’s guidelines .

Despite all of these prick , Wikipedians ca n’t be everywhere . With more than 1.9 million English - language article alone , the potential for abuse is tremendous , especially by anonymous exploiter [ author : Wikimedia ] . Enter theWikiScanner , a free program unveiled in August 2007 by Virgil Griffith , a graduate pupil study computation and nervous systems at the California Institute of Technology and a visiting investigator at the Santa Fe Institute .

Whenever an unregistered , anon. user delete a Wikipedia ingress , the site log the user’sIP address , the unique string of number that identifies each computer unite to the Internet . The WikiScanner uses these records to retrace the IP address of anon. Wikipedia editors . By compare the IP addresses against a database of company that own them , the Scanner can name the editor , or at least the organization responsible for the substance abuser ’s access .

The results have been astounding – tens of millions of anonymous edits , performed by more than 180,000 organizations , some of them in clean-cut violation of Wikipedia policy . Among the many organizations cited : the FBI , CIA , Britain ’s Labour Party , the Vatican , Wal - Mart , the Republican Party , the Church of Scientology , Dell Computers , Microsoft , Apple and the United Nations .

In this article , we ’ll take a close look at how the WikiScanner works , look at some peculiarly controversial or plainly gonzo example of anon. editing and consider some of the chemical reaction to the WikiScanner . We ’ll also show you how you may utilise the WikiScanner to see what some organizations and troupe may be up to on Wikipedia .

Creating the Wikipedia Scanner

In create the WikiScanner , Virgil Griffith took reward of one of Wikipedia ’s main feature of speech – its extensive records and backlogs . To see an model of what these record search like , but fall into place on the " history " lozenge at the top of a Wikipedia entrance . There you’re able to see the name of registered users who edited the article , theIP addressesof anon. editors and notes on change . you’re able to also easily equate different versions of an article or leave a message for an editor program , even an anonymous one .

Wikipedia makes it possible to download a complete version of the cyclopedia , include every clause and the record book of all edits performed . Griffith downloaded the arrant encyclopedia and extracted all of the anon. changes and their associated IP addresses . He come up with 34,417,493 anon. edits made from Feb. 7 , 2002 through Aug. 4 , 2007 from 2,668,095 different IP address [ source : Griffith ] .

A variety of services , some of them publicly available , make it possible to trace IP addresses to the corporations , authorities entity and constitution that own them . Using software from IP2Location , a company that sells platform that allow exploiter to match IP addresses with their owners , Griffith found that 187,529 governance had performed anonymous edits of Wikipedia entry [ informant : Griffith ] .

That ’s about all there is to it . It may seem like a wide-eyed estimation in possibility , but no one before Virgil Griffith had take a comprehensive look at anonymous Wikipedia edits and tried to regain all of the substance abuser behind them . Now accessible through Griffith ’s Web website , the WikiScanner set aside users to search for specific organizations , a single IP address , a range of IP addresses , or a Wikipedia entry . After its initial launch , Griffith temporarily invalid some of the site ’s features due to the enceinte traffic it was incur but after returned with enough bandwidth " to manage the web traffic of a little state " [ source : Griffith ] .

So what kind of resultant did the WikiScanner dig up ? Read on to discover out .

Exposed by the Wikipedia Scanner

With more than 34 million anonymous edits performed by 187,529 organizations , it will take quite a while before anyone sifts through the datum and finds all of the potentially controversial edits exposed by the WikiScanner . And of row , anon. redaction will go on as long as it stay a feature of Wikipedia . But many organizations have already been outed by the WikiScanner . In this section , we ’ll await at what Griffith and other users have found .

Diebold Election Systems received a lot of attention for the anonymous edits performed by masses with access to their electronic web . The manufacturer ofelectronic votingmachines had already been subject to controversy about the caliber of its machines and contributions made by the company CEO to George Bush ’s political military campaign . The WikiScanner revealed that in November 2005 , 15 paragraph that discussed these controversies were deleted by a drug user delineate to a Diebold - ownedIP address . Soon after , another user put the erase articles back in the article and issue the anon. editor program a warning on his " talk of the town Thomas Nelson Page . "

A user trace to a Democratic party IP savoir-faire edited entries about button-down talk show emcee Rush Limbaugh , calling him " idiotic , " " racist " and a " bigot " [ rootage : Wikipedia ] . The editor program also wrote that most of Limbaugh ’s audience was " legally retarded , " described his power point of view as " ridiculous " and linked the parole " ridiculous " to Wikipedia ’s clause on Conservatism [ informant : Wikipedia ] . Users of Democratic Party information processing system also perform bare transcript edits on clause about presumably uncontroversial topics , such as British lawn tennis player Tim Henman , burrito chain Baja Fresh andgreen roofs .

Someone at the National Rifle Association made changes to a pageboy about rumors surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks . The anon. editor altered a paragraph to draw a connectedness between the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 attacks [ source : Griffith ] . Someone at the same organisation twice edit the Wikipedia entry about the account of the liger , a crossing between a male lion and a distaff tiger [ source : Griffith ] .

Besides various gaiter between political rivals , the WikiScanner give away representative of companionship editing Sir Frederick Handley Page about their rival . Apple edited Microsoft page , and someone at Microsoft did so for Apple . British newspaper " The Guardian " edited an entry for competing paper " The Times . "

Many of the anonymous edits are quite humorous , especially when considering the reservoir . ACIAweb surfer give a foresighted entry aboutlightsabercombat . Someone at DARPA , the Department of Defense ’s highly advanced enquiry agency , blue-pencil entry about " The actual World : Denver , " actor Shia LaBeouf and hockey player Bill Guerin . None of those edits appeared malicious or against Wikipedia insurance .

Consequences of the Wikipedia Scanner

On his personal Web site , Griffith state that he came up with the idea for the WikiScanner after get a line that Congressmen werewhitewashingtheir own Wikipedia entries by taking out negative statement or replacing negative words with positive ace [ origin : Griffith ] . For model , a " controversial " or " erratic " political leader might instead be called " active . "

Among the other reasons for create the WikiScanner , Griffith order that he wished " to create minor public dealings disasters for company and organizations I dislike " and " to see what ' interesting organizations ' ( which I am inert towards ) are up to " [ source : Griffith ] . He also jokes that he want " to amend virgil.gr ’s Google pagerank [ sic ]   for the query ' virgil . ' "

The promulgation of the WikiScanner spawned legion paper article and spurred amateur detectives around the world to go hunt for villainous editing . It appears Griffith achieve one of his goals in that many corporations now present doubt over the practices of people with access to their net .

If the WikiScanner traces an edit to a company’sIP address , it does n’t mean that an employee perform the edits or that the company sanction or ordered the action at law . The program ca n’t trace edits to a specific person – only the IP destination and the company that own it . But Griffith noted that if the edit was performed during the workday , then the person who made the changes was likely " either an agent of that caller or a guest that was allowed access to their mesh " [ source : Griffith ] .

One of Wikipedia ’s fundamental principles is maintaining a neutral point of eyeshot ( NPOV ) , which Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales calls " right-down and non - negotiable " [ beginning : Wikimedia ] . Many of the controversial edits uncovered by the WikiScanner ravish the NPOV rule .

Griffith aver that he favour that undefended platforms like Wikipedia allow users to edit anonymously , but that tools like WikiScanner could be utilitarian in counterbalance malicious editing [ source : Griffith ] . It could be used to serve maintain the unity of controversial pages and to chase when a page is vandalized . Or , the tool may lead in people being more heedful about anonymous edits , perform them from home base or public computer systems .

In an interview with the " Times Online , " Griffith order that his next labor might occupy the personal information people place on social networking internet site [ source : Times Online ] .

For more info about the WikiScanner and to see lists of some of the organizations exposed by the WikiScanner , please check out the links on the next page .

Lots More Information

germ