In August 2007 WikiScanner burst on the scene with a clever way to track anonymous corporate, government and NGO Wikipedia edits by matching them with their IP addresses. The buzz around the site, I suspect, sent many to their home computers to edit Wikipedia as they please. Some of them surely are PR professionals. However, coming soon, these edits too may be exposed - at least that's the developer's promise.
Virgil Griffith, the 25-year-old genius behind the original, and a team from CalTech is readying the launch of WikiScanner2. A beta site is already live. The previous version, Griffith writes, "would cut corners
and is easy to hide from either by creating a Wikipedia account or
editing from home." WikiScanner2 uses a more sophisticated IP-tracking
database to
purportedly "automatically discover salacious edits as well as provide a better
tools for humans to prowl through the data manually."
WikiScanner2 features a Google Suggest like interface. Enter a few keywords and it will return a list of relevant organizations. To put the tool through its paces I check to find what edits the Obama campaign allegedly made to the site. (For the record, I voted for Obama but decided this was a good test case.)
After entering in Obama for America, I was presented with a list of all edits from their IP addresses by location and telco. Some of these, it appears, could have been made with a home computer - although its unclear if that's the case. These could simply be the campaign's ISP at the time.
Once you enter a search, you're then given the option to view edits from any of these locations either individually or in unison. WikiScanner2 will provide a table with a list of the page allegedly edited, the user's comments, the date of the edit, IP address and - last but not least - the ability to rate edits up or down. The previous version was far more crude, as you can see from this screen capture.
The most interesting new feature is the addition of an algorithm that tracks potential conflicts of interest. It's unclear how this is calculated but one such search for the John McCain revealed that 46.7% of the 15 edits they made were a direct conflict of interest according to the rules that govern WIkipedia. Also noteworthy is that the site will now also highlight registered Wikipedia users if he/she has made a lot of edits from a particular domain.
As a purist, I welcome the addition of the new and improved WikiScanner tool. I want to see Wikipedia hopefully maintain its neutral point of view. I may be conservative, but generally I advise companies not to create their own WIkipedia pages or to edit existing entries. I advocate that they plead their case on the talk pages and see what shakes out.
If it's true that WIkiScanner2 can track home-based edits, perhaps this will lead to greater scrutiny around what I am sure takes place on the site every day - bogus edits and astroturfing. However, the jury is out right now just how capable this site in that regard. Still, there's no doubt it's dramatically improved.
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