Little Brother is Watching
August 21, 2007 | Written by Yan Shikhvarger
As an individual, I hate liars. In this day and age, the very notion of lying betrays a certain ignorance in the liar. Does anyone still expect to get away with it? Does anyone still believe they can exist behind a facade of misrepresentations?
Apparently such people and corporations still exist in large numbers, as evidenced by the glut of biased, "anonymous" Wikipedia edits that are now ever so easy to track, thanks to the new site WikiScanner. The site’s function is very simple: it identifies the owners of the computer networks associated with each edit made to Wikipedia entries. Wikipedia has always displayed the IP addresses accompanying each edit, and if one were really determined, he or she could cross-reference the address using specialized IP address search engines. Virgil Griffith, the Caltech graduate student who created the site, removes the laborious step of having to manually cross-reference each IP address, and the proverbial curtain has now been pulled.
The findings? Wow. Of course there are the generally harmless edits that I’m sure most of us have made to any number of pages; things like grammatical and syntactic improvements, or correcting an erroneous fact on subject in which we’re presumably knowledgeable. And then there’s a completely different class of edits: deleting entire sections, changing the tones of paragraphs, and generally using Wikipedia as your own little spin machine.
The cast of guilty characters includes some heavy-hitters: the Central Intelligence Agency, PepsiCo, Diebold, Anheuser-Busch, Wal-Mart, and on and on. The edits themselves are fairly predictable in nature: highlight the good, downplay or delete the bad. Unfortunately for these companies, Wikipedia does not exist to serve their every PR need. It is meant to be a non-biased source of information, despite its sometimes-dubious reliability.
Wikipedia itself does not prohibit such "conflict of interest" editing, but it strongly discourages it, according to Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia. "We don’t make it an absolute rule," said Wales, "but it’s definitely a guideline." (NY Times, 8/19/07)
With any luck, WikiScanner will more or less ban "conflict of interest" editing from Wikipedia. An entire readership will now be on the lookout, only a few clicks away from exposing any foul play. Whatever will these corporations do? Take the bad with the good? I, for one, am excited to watch from the stands as a happily informed reader.
More from RFI Studios
- Is crowdsourcing reverse plagiarism? – Left Brain
- Google Life – Left Brain
- Rudder Fin and Googleability – Left Brain
- Is your CEO a bo ke? – Left Brain
- Print obsolete? – Left Brain
Comments (1)
August 21st, 2007 at 5:07 pm Posted by michael beno
I’d be interested to know how this is going to affect SEO moving forward, if at all. Wikipedia has obviously had a huge influence on the evolution of search engine marketing strategies the past few years, but what’s going to happen as it gets more and more difficult to manipulate keywords without getting called out for being biased?
And what percentage of Wikipedia entries are completely unbiased anyway? Seems like the answer to that question just went from subjective to objective depending on the corresponding IP address.
I say Wikipedia for president…or at least press secretary…
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