Wikipedia a moveable feast of facts unmasked

Stan Beer
Sunday, 19 August 2007 15:28

Your IT - Home IT

It appears that the old adage "don't believe everything you read" holds especially true for the online encyclopedia for the masses, Wikipedia. Graduate student from the California Institute of Technology and hacker, Virgil Griffith, has developed software that can track the source of self-serving edits and attempts to rewrite history that are cropping up in the Wiki with increasing frequency.

The Wikipedia Scanner developed by Griffiths can be accessed from a web page and provides users with the ability to specify organizations, IP addresses or Wiki pages in order to call up a history of edits made to particular pages.

Griffith admits that the Wikipedia Scanner was developed to fulfill his desire to "create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike" and "to see what "interesting organizations" (which I am neutral toward), are up to."

If nothing else, Wikipedia Scanner provides a fascinating insight into the lengths to which organizations will go in order to obliterate potentially damaging commentary about them. It also shows what some organizations are prepared to do in order to fabricate history.

While Griffith is reluctant to name instances of organizations who have been guilty of accessing Wiki pages written about them by others and embellishing the facts, he does provide a comprehensive list of links to interesting Wiki edits made by some of his "favorite" targets.

Some his corporate favorites include Diebold, Amgen, Pfizer, Wal-Mart Stores, ExxonMobil and Raytheon. Griffith also has links to the National Rifle Association, American Civil Liberties Union, Rand Corporation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a number of US Federal Government agencies, including the CIA.