http://www.katu.com/news/tech/9178937.html<b>New online tool unmasks Wikipedia edits</b>

By Associated Press
What edits on Wikipedia have been made by people in congressional offices, the CIA and the Church of Scientology? A new online tool called WikiScanner reveals answers to such questions.

As the Web encyclopedia that anyone can edit, Wikipedia encourages participants to adopt online user names, but it also lets contributors be identified simply by their computers' numeric Internet addresses.

Often that does not provide much of a cloak, such as when PCs in congressional offices were discovered to have been involved in Wikipedia entries trashing political rivals.

Those episodes inspired Virgil Griffith, a computer scientist about to enter grad school at CalTech, to automate the process with WikiScanner. (It's at http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr but intense attention has knocked it out of service many times this week.)

The free Scanner grabs the Internet Protocol addresses used in anonymous Wikipedia edits in the past five years. By combining that with public information about which IP addresses belong to whom, the Scanner reveals Wikipedia changes made from computers assigned to a bevy of organizations, including, um, The Associated Press.

Many of the edits are predictably self-interested: PCs in Scientology officialdom were used to remove criticism in the church's Wikipedia entry. But others hint at procrastinating office workers, such as the tweaks to Wikipedia articles on TV shows being made from CIA computers.

Many examples are being tallied at http://wired.reddit.com/wikidgame - a page run by Wired News, which reported earlier on WikiScanner.

Griffith wrote on his site that he hopes ''to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike.''

Whatever comes of it, WikiScanner has a fan in Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. ''It is fabulous and I strongly support it,'' Wales told the AP.Nifty utility. Check out the growing list of who's editing what (http://wired.reddit.com/wikidgame).

I read most of the titles, but didn't click through to see each edit.

Man, O, man, that doesn't bode well for people who swear by Wiki. How does one know if one of the many spin doctors, such as Walmart, Mormon church, Republicans, Democrats, Fox News, New York Times, BBC, NSA, CIA, Planned Parenthood, NRA, Overstock.com, Sony, Scientology, and many, many, many more might have just been by and completely raped an article, or if the article is more or less factual??

This, in my opinion, completely reinforces why I insist upon links to scans of original source documents in any sort of debate.

This, in my opinion, completely reinforces why I insist upon links to scans of original source documents in any sort of debate.How do you know those source documents are factual and unbiased?

At least with Wikipedia, the user base has an opportunity to correct such errors.

Any scholarship prefers original source material over Wikipedia, because that eliminates as many possible human errors from the chain.

If you have an original source document, your concern about backing out the bias has been paired down to one, the original source author.

For example, Josephus's history would be predisposed to a favorable view of Flavius, and his son Titus, since, Flavius was his patron. Also, his portrayal of the Jewish people would be favorable as a whole.

But those biases are easy to discern and correct for, vs. Wikipedia, which is history and scholarship by popular mob rule, which has an ever rising number of editors and authors. And no individual accountablity, even with this new software. What penalty will be assessed against these groups that sought to alter entries? None.

At least with a scholarly work, at least theoretically, the scholar who produced it would be concerned about his academic reputation, and would attempt to use original source materials whenever available, as it forestalls all debate on the veracity of the sources used. It will not forestall all debate and disagreement, of course, but it cuts out a whole avenue of attack.

If you've ever had to produce an academic paper or a research thesis, good schools will include a committee that will attempt to find fault with your scholarship, so that you don't develop sloppy scholarship. This, again, does not ironclad guarantee that the budding scholar cannot be fooled, but it brings a greater chance that it will be the exception, and not a commonplace event.

The same cannot be said for Wikipedia, as you don't know from one minute to the next who was there before you and edited even "just a line or two". Words mean things.

The same cannot be said for Wikipedia, as you don't know from one minute to the next who was there before you and edited even "just a line or two".
But you do! Or, at least, you know _what_ they edited. Am I the only one that makes a point of checking the page history for any page that I have more than a passing interest in? The page history shows exactly what edits were made and when. Most Internet sources don't provide that kind of information.

(Yes, a page history can theoretically be tampered with by high level Wikipedia admins. To fully trust information from any Internet source you have to trust, among other people, the administrators of the site hosting the information.)

If you have an original source document, your concern about backing out the bias has been paired down to one, the original source author.And anyone else who had a hand in writing the document. And every other source he uses. There are very few original sources you can completely depend on for accurate, unbiased information. Even scholarly sources such as peer-reviewed studies and journals are often biased.But those biases are easy to discern and correct for,If you know exactly what they are, which is rarely the case. However, with Wikipedia, the correction process is automatic.

The arguments you're making are similar to the ones proprietary software companies make against open source software. And just as in that example, while they might sound plausible in theory, in reality they break down.

Both battlestarwiki and narutowiki are untainted! All is good in the world. ;P

Scholars should find a reliable source for their information. I'm not sure who ever promoted the idea that Wikipaedia could be entirely reliable, given that information can vary from minute to minute.

It is disconceting that Wikipaedia is used as a propoganda or marketing tool. However it seems inevitable in our society. There will be organisations and individuals who view their self-promotion as more important than the media they comminicate through. Wikipaedia is part of the mass media and will get abused just as much as other portions of the media.

Well, given that you can find the history of all edits, I don't think it's such a big deal. Wikipedia gives people a place to go to get information quickly, if you need to verify that information, you go look at other sources too. I don't see what the big deal is.