By Deborah Newell Tornello
a.k.a. litbrit
One of Wikipedia's greatest strengths--the open-editing format that (nearly always) permits ordinary citizens to add, subtract, or alter content--is also one of its largest liabilities, since persons with less-than-honorable intentions can manipulate data for any number of nefarious reasons: discrediting a competing company, say, or spreading disinformation. At least, they can and will until someone else notices and re-edits an entry. And while Wiki is undeniably useful for writers and researchers of every stripe, the very fact that its insta-data is so easily manipulable by anyone and everyone should serve as a whisper in the ear--if not a huge and wildly undulating red flag--that it might be a good idea to double-check the content against another source, that it would be prudent to ask oneself, before quoting a Wiki entry at length, I wonder whose fingerprints are on this stuff, anyway?
CalTech graduate student Virgil Griffith had that very thought. And thecomputation and neural-systems academic decided that not only was ittime to figure out who was behind all the edits, but that it would alsobe a boon to the free and open marketplace of ideas to offer thegeneral public a way to know, too.
And thus Wikipedia Scanner was born. From Wired Magazine:
OnNovember 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphsfrom an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entiresection critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, suchchanges typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hintsabout the contributor, such as the location of the computer used tomake the edits.
