WikiScanner Exposes Wikipedia Editors

Consider this another reason to listen to your teacher when they tell you not to believe everything your read on Wikipedia.

Many contend that Wikipedia is an accurate resource most of the time, but educators remain skeptical about the quality of a user-generated online encyclopedia. Most of the distrust comes from the way anyone in the world can edit entries without any accountability, and before WikiScanner, people really had to do some digging to find out who was editing what.

In order to keep Wikipedia entries as honest as possible, Virgil Griffith created WikiScanner, an online application that matches every edit to an IP address. For example, a quick search on any organization, will return a list of edits that can be traced back to their source using IP addresses, location, and type of changes they made.

WikiScanner itself has a list of links on its sidebar to questionable edits made by people within the CIA, Fox News, The New York Times, BBC, Vatican, and other high profile organizations. You still have to do a bit of digging to see what corporations are deleting from their Wikipedia entry, but if you head over to Wired's Threat Level you'll find netizens happily searching for suspicious—and sometimes funny—edits to post on Wired's wall of shame.

Link: New online tool unmasks Wikipedia edits