Wikipedia Unmasked

Excerpt from article....

When an edit is made to a Wikipedia page, the IP address that made the
change is recorded. What Griffith did was take the 34,417,493 anonymous
edits added between February 2004 and August 2007 and correlate them with
the IP addresses of hedge funds, law firms, media companies, the CIA, and
the rest of us. He dubbed the result Wikiscanner, and launched it two weeks
ago.

Disruption occurred. The site lit up the Boing-Boing-osphere, a story about
corporate edits made the cover of the New York Times, and-what fellow
hackers seemed most impressed by-Stephen Colbert used Wikiscanner as the
centerpiece of a Word of the Day monologue on The Colbert Report. The Threat
Level blog at Wired took the lead in gathering the most egregious edits, a
dragnet that rounded up the usual suspects. A Scientology IP added a link to
the Kurt Cobain page that suggests the singer's childhood Ritalin
prescription led him to suicide. An Exxon IP cleaned up the section on the
effects of the Valdez oil spill, cheerfully noting "six of the largest
salmon harvests in history were recorded in the decade immediately following
the spill." A Philip Morris IP deleted this sentence from a history
paragraph of the "Marlboro (cigarette)" page: "It emerged as the number one
youth-initiation brand."

Complete article...

http://www.slate.com/id/2172703/?GT1=10252

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