Anonymous Edits To Wikipedia Revealed Through Wikiscanner

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by: Karl Long

I read a great article in the SF Bay Guardian written by Annalee Newitz who blogs at techsploitation.com (awesome name). Anyway, the article is called And the real anonymous trolls online are . . . . In this article she skewers the very un-anonymous troll Andrew Keen, who’s been crying about how the internets is undermining his word view of authority and modernity (maybe he should check out Bioshock).

Anyway, this is a rather round about way to talk about a tool called wikiscanner which basically looks up the ip address of any anonymous edits on wikipedia and then looks up what organization owns that ip address. The result, lots of egg on government and corporation faces. With Pepsi editing some of the negative health effects of diet pepsi, to exxon adjusting the size of past oil spills, or wal-mart changing facts about their wages. Some of these edits actually reveal some stewardship of course like Pixar editing the Shrek 4 entry to reflect that it was a Dreamworks Animation and not Pixar.

All of these gems were taken from the Wired reddit list of most salacious wikipedia anonymous edits

If you’re a company that doesn’t have a wikipedia policy get one now.

Relate see my article on uncommon uses for the wiki

Original Post: http://experiencecurve.com/archives/anonymous-edits-to-wikipedia-revealed-through-wikiscanner