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

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Antid Oto <[email protected]>
> Date: 15 augustus 2007 17:33:45 CEST
> To: Discussielijst over D66 <D66-b/[email protected]>
> Subject: See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
>
> REPLY TO: D66-b/[email protected]
>
> http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker
>
> 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.
>
> As has been previously reported, politician's offices are heavy  
> users of
> the system. Former Montana Sen. Conrad Burns' office, for example,
> apparently changed one critical paragraph headed "A controversial  
> voice"
> to "A voice for farmers," with predictably image-friendly content
> following it.
>
> Perhaps interestingly, many of the most apparently self-interested
> changes come from before 2006, when news of the Congressional offices'
> edits reached the headlines. This may indicate a growing  
> sophistication
> with the workings of Wikipedia over time, or even the rise of  
> corporate
> Wikipedia policies.
>
> Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told Wired News he was aware of the new
> service, but needed time to experiment with it before commenting.
>
> The vast majority of changes are fairly innocuous, however.  
> Employees at
> the CIA's net address, for example, have been busy -- but with little
> that would indicate their place of apparent employment, or a  
> particular
> bias.
>
> One entry on "Black September in Jordan" contains wholesale additions,
> with specific details that read like a popular history book or an
> eyewitness' memoir.
>
> Many more are simple copy edits, or additions to local town entries or
> school histories. One CIA entry deals with the details of lyrics  
> sung in
> a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode.
>
> Griffith says he launched the project hoping to find scandals,
> particularly at obvious targets such as companies like Halliburton.  
> But
> there's a more practical goal, too: By exposing the anonymous edits  
> that
> companies such as drugs and big pharmaceutical companies make in  
> entries
> that affect their businesses, it could help experts check up on the
> changes and make sure they're accurate, he says.
>
> For now, he has just scratched the surface of the database of millions
> of entries. But he's putting it online so others can look too.
>
> The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not
> respond to e-mail and telephone inquiries Monday.
>
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