Who's Editing Wikipedia?
One of the biggest problems with Wikipedia is the ease at which partisan users can anonymously make changes to entries: If the article about Acme Inc reports news that Acme Inc doesn't like, they can just go in and change it. Sure, the site records the IP address of every user (at least the ones who don't hide themselves). But most Wikipedia users don't look at page history, and even fewer would know or care how to figure out who is really commenting.
But now a new tool is shining light on the anonymous editing of Wikipedia, and illustrating how members of organizations from the CIA to Microsoft to the US Congress are manipulating the site. According to Wired, CalTech graduate student Virgil Griffith has created WikiScanner, a search tool that traces IP addresses of those who make Wikipedia changes.
Using it, he's found egregious abuse of the site like changes made by someone at voting-machine company Diebold, who apparently deleted content regarding concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and details of their CEO's Republican fund-raising.
The tool has only been up and running for a short period of time, and I suspect we've only scratched the surface: as more people play with this, they're going to find many more examples of Wikipedia abuse. Wired's Threat Level blog is already compiling a nice list.
I just stuck after reading the news that Wikipedia is one of the source that is being used for intelligence service through infiltration; The question is whether it's moderated regularly and do the moderators are aware about this?
-Bob
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=374006&rel;_no=1
Posted by: micfo.com | August 15, 2007 at 06:40 AM
Bob, Wikipedia isn't "moderated" in the traditional sense of moderation. I am one of the administrators on the English Wikipedia which means I can delete (and undelete) articles, protect (prevent anyone people from editing) articles and block specific users.
The reality is, Wikipedia has an incredible amount of edits made to it every minute (it was something to the tune of 200 or so last time I checked) - it's next to impossible for a moderator to review every one (let alone check if it's accurate.) We do have some automated scripts which attempt to fix very obvious vandalism, but there's only so much we can catch with an program (much like spam filters can only catch so much)
As for the ohmynews article, I'd take it's information the same as I'd take a Wikipedia article, I'd want to verify the references and authoritative sources. There are some big big questions about the reliability of the information in that article. Are there intelligence agents on Wikipedia, most likely yes, if they have admin rights... nobody knows. Is there anything we can do about it, I would say no.
Can intelligence agencies influence the mainstream media too, likely, can they get your search history, likely. It's a problem not just isolated to Wikipedia.
Posted by: Tawker | August 15, 2007 at 10:16 AM
Wikipedia reminds me of that old joke about the encyclopedias in the Soviet Union with the loose leaf pages.
Posted by: ala | August 16, 2007 at 04:39 PM