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Wikipedia UnmaskedA new Web site reveals the sneak attacks and ego-fluffing of your friends and co-workers.

By Michael Agger
Posted Friday, Aug. 24, 2007, at 4:35 PM ET
Virgil Griffith. Click image to expand.

Wikipedia seems benign and geeky, so eager to share its awkwardly written knowledge. Let us tell you about Atari 2600, Impressionism, and orcs! The nerd orientation, however, distracts from what the site has become: an information battleground. Type "Exxon" into Google and the first two hits are official Exxon sites; the third is the company's Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia is the fourth hit for "Philip Morris," the third for "Starbucks," the fifth for "New York Times." The Wikipedia page has become a public face for corporations, and they have an incentive to polish and scrub their entries.

Enter Virgil Griffith, a self-described "disruptive technologist" and future CalTech graduate student. After reading about members of Congress who altered their Wikipedia entries, Griffith thought up a clever stink bomb. Wikipedia pages can be edited anonymously, but the anonymity is not total. When a computer connects to the Internet, it's assigned an IP address. (Click here to discover yours.) This address can change each time you connect, but organizations typically have a defined range of IP addresses. 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."

While these edits are embarrassing, they are not exactly smoking guns. Just because someone with a Scientology-associated IP edited the Kurt Cobain entry, it doesn't mean a Scientology employee made the change. Here is how Griffith explains it: "Technically, we don't know if it came from an agent of that company. However, we do know that edit came from someone with access to their network. If the edit occurred during working hours, then we can reasonably assume that the person is either an employee of that company or a guest that was allowed access to their network." Even so, it makes sense to tread lightly with accusations. For example, a lot of people create and update their own Wikipedia pages—for ego, for networking, for the hell of it. When I did a wikiscan of the Washington Post IP range, I turned up a change to my colleague Jack Shafer's page. The sentence:

He is perhaps best known for his obituary for Walter Annenberg, entitled "Citizen Annenberg - So long you rotten bastard", a fine example of early twenty-first century American poison pen obituary writing.

had been amended to:

He is perhaps best known for his critical obituary of Walter Annenberg, entitled "Citizen Annenberg - So long you rotten bastard".

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Michael Agger is a Slate senior editor. You can reach him at
Photograph of Virgil Griffith by Henry Strickland.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Note that the Harry Potter spoiler, the penis/NYT edit, the FOX edit, and Oral Sex edit disappeared in about a minute, sometimes less. Unfortunately FOX's On the Lot lasted a stunning 13 minutes. (Go to Newer Edit, then look at the "Revision as of" line to see the time difference)

The other edits, especially the edits that aren't as obvious as the cliche LISA IS A LESBIAN!!!, sometimes sit around for a while. I removed some vandalism from the Lord of the Flies page that had lasted for weeks insisting that Roger was a perfectly little angel (he's really a symbol of sadism).

There's a reason these edits usually disappear so quickly. The Wikipedia community has set up many mechanisms and tools for dealing with vandalism. Among other things, anti vandalism editors are assisted by tools that ease checking new edits. VandalBot, an automated program, catches simple vandalism such as blanking pages. Now Wikiscanner is yet another deterrent. The system isn't perfect, but it's much better at protecting Wikipedia than many critics realize.

--PostoStudanto

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