Fingerprints Found on Your Wikipedia Edits

"Last year a Wikipedia visitor edited the entry for the SeaWorld theme parks to change all mentions of “orcas” to “killer whales,” insisting that this was a more accurate name for the species.

There was another, unexplained edit: a paragraph about criticism of SeaWorld’s “lack of respect toward its orcas” disappeared. Both changes, it turns out, originated at a computer at Anheuser-Busch, SeaWorld’s owner.

• Dozens of similar examples of insider editing came to light last week through WikiScanner, a new Web site that traces the source of millions of changes to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor’s network. The address information was already available on Wikipedia, but the new site makes it much easier to connect those numbers with the names of network owners.....

• In general, changes to a Wikipedia page cannot be traced to an individual, only to the owner of a particular network....."

From NY Times article by Katie Hafner, "Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits," 8/19/07

• A longtime current Yankee player had a gruesome and inaccurate write-up, so I made changes to include some positives with all the negatives (this was some months ago). Within seconds, my edits were removed and the original version restored. I tried a few more times but the same thing happened. Then I was completely blocked from the site. The back-up "sources" for the original version were newspapers from........Boston. (sm)

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