A Move to Unmask the Wikipedians

August 14, 2007 05:19 PM ET | Permanent Link

This could be very bad news for Wikipedia.

The gargantuan, user-edited encyclopedia has a knack for showing up in the crosshairs of the perseverating debate over the uses and misuses of citizen media. Not only can anyone submit or delete anything to the site; he or she can do so without leaving so much as an alias behind. All edits are archived, so the next guy to come along can either restore a previous version or add his own entry.

Given that model, Wikipedia is often startlingly accurate, causing more and more readers to trust its contents. (This keeps a lot of school librarians up at night.) But even if the facts on a given page are correct and well sourced, the contributors themselves—and their agendas—have remained largely anonymous, until now.

Users can choose to register for the site and have their edits listed under their login name. Otherwise, the only trail they leave is an IP (Internet protocol) address, the digital signature for the author's Internet connection. But the widely accepted sense that the user's contributions and redactions are anonymous is a myth, as California Institute of Technology graduate student Virgil Griffith reminds us with an application he launched yesterday: WikiScanner, which traces the IP addresses to their host and then identifies cases where an edit to an entry was made by someone directly tied to the subject. (Note: The site is being flooded with traffic at the moment.)

For example, Wired magazine discusses in its article on WikiScanner how someone at Diebold, the maker of an electronic voting machine, deleted 15 paragraphs from the Wikipedia article about its product.

Griffith's corpus of data is enormous, so sites like Wired.com have encouraged users to submit their own gems, a process known as "crowd sourcing" in Web parlance. The early returns have already churned out some winners: Someone at the New York Times apparently really thinks George W. Bush is a jerk, while someone who works for the Republican Party of Minnesota chose to replace the Harry Potter entry with the outcome of the sixth book shortly after it was published, to name just two.

There's a lot of information here, so it's difficult to size up yet whether it will be a major blow to Wikipedia's credibility — or to the credibility of organizations caught embellishing their entries or attacking their competitors anonymously. But Wikipedia's critics, like Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen, aren't holding back:

"I absolutely applaud this," Keen says. "If [Wikipedia cofounder] Jimmy Wales wants to save Wikipedia—and it's not all bad—he has a moral obligation to fight anonymity."

—Chris Wilson

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