From www.smh.com.au
August 16, 2007 - 6:20AM
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.
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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.)
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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. ... more >>>
© 2006 AP DIGITAL
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