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See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
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[35]John Borland
[36]Business
Aug 14, 2007 12:00 PM

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

CalTech graduate student Virgil Griffith built a search tool that
traces IP addresses of those who make Wikipedia changes.

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CalTech graduate student Virgil Griffith built a search tool that
traces IP addresses of those who make Wikipedia changes. Photo: Jake
Appelbaum

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.

[37]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.

Share Your Sleuthing!

Cornered any companies polishing up their Wikipedia entries? Spotted
any government spooks rewriting history? Try Virgil Griffith's
[38]Wikipedia Scanner yourself, then [39]submit your finds and vote on
other readers' discoveries here.

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 [40]deleting long
paragraphs [41]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.
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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, [46]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 [47]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 [48]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.

[49]Diebold Loses Key Copyright Case

[50]The Wikipedia FAQK

[51]Wikipedia Tightens the Reins

[52]Wikipedia Faces Growing Pains

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