See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign

[Dave Monroe]

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
By John Borland Email 08.14.07 | 2:00 AM

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15
paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold,
excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While
anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints
offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the
computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the
corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated
case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of
Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time
puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of
manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in
investigations of specific allegations.

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.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been
editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to
know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things
in a similarly self-interested vein.

"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it,"
he says with a grin.

This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia
policies and (mostly) publicly available information.

The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps
detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are
tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public
record of their IP address.

The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia,
including records of all these changes.

Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the
XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then
correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services
such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by
IP2Location.com.

The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million
organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to
Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at
their organization's net address has made.

Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either
adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting
whole swaths of critical material.

Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter,
with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long
paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the
integrity of their voting machines, and information about the
company's CEO's fund-raising for President Bush.

The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another
Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop
removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."

A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter
but could not comment by press time.

Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that
burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving
criticism in, changing a line that its wages are less than other
retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage,
for example. Another leaves activist criticism on community impact
intact, while citing a "definitive" study showing Wal-Mart raised the
total number of jobs in a community.

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker

Vote On the Most Shameful Wikipedia Spin Jobs
By Kevin Poulsen EmailAugust 13, 2007 | 11:03:01 PMCategories: Wikiwatch

Wikipedia Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith just launched an
unofficial Wikipedia search tool that threatens to lay bare the
ego-editing  and anonymous flacking on the site. Enter the name of a
corporation, organization or government entity and you get a list of
IP addresses assigned to it. Then with one or two clicks, you can see
all the anonymous edits made from those addresses anywhere in
Wikipedia's pages.

Griffith's work is a neat example of what can be uncovered just by
reorganizing public information. Wired News writer John Borland has
the full story here.

THREAT LEVEL predicts a lot of sad, embarrassing secrets will emerge
from this project once netizens dive into it -- and we'd like to be a
part of that. So visit the Wikipedia Scanner and do some sleuthing.
Post what you find here on our wall of shame, where you can join other
Wired News readers in voting submissions up or down. We've seeded the
list with a few finds of our own. Happy hunting!

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/wikiwatch/