Wikipedia sleuth's tool reveals entry fiddling

A computer researcher has devised a way of tracking changes made to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, to expose organizations and individuals who tweak and airbrush their own entries. The sleuthing tool allows Wikipedia users to trace the source of millions of changes to entries on the popular website, even those done anonymously. So far the Wikipedia Scanner has unearthed a host of entry fiddling by organizations ranging from the CIA and the British Labor Party to Wal-Mart and the Mormon church. For example, employees of the intelligence agency have been found altering the biographical information on former presidents including Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. A worker at Millbank, the Labor Party HQ, meanwhile tweaked an entry on Labor Students to remove suggestions the group was being overtaken by careerist politicians at the expense of grassroots radicals. Other questionable fiddling includes Vatican workers changing entries on Catholic Saints and Mormons and Scientologists removing certain passages from their entries. Virgil Griffith, 24, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, created the tool partly in response to news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their Wikipedia entries. The scanner works by trawling the millions of edits made to the website's pages to reveal the unique IP (internet protocol) address of the computer the changes were made from, so-called digital fingerprints that can reveal an editor's location. It uses a publicly available list of IP addresses assigned to companies or individuals and then scours changes to Wikipedia pages to reveal all the anonymous edits made from those addresses. Diebold, a company that makes electronic voting machines, was among the first culprits exposed by the scanner. Its staff were found to have removed criticisms recording widespread industry concern about the security of its products and its CEO's fund-raising for President Bush. The changes was quickly reversed by other editors. Wal-Mart was also caught spinning in a section on employees' pay, replacing the assertion that "wages at Wal-Mart are about 20 percent less than at other retail stores" with "the average wage at Wal-Mart is almost double the federal minimum wage." Republican Party computers were found to be behind changes to the "Post-Saddam" section of the Baath Party entry, where they swapped "US-led occupation" for "US-led liberation." And a Democrat Party headquarters computer was responsible for an alteration to the entry on Rush Limbaugh, a conservative American radio host, that labeled him "idiotic" and "ridiculous." There has long been dispute over the reliability and impartiality of "citizen-edited" websites and earlier this year Microsoft was embroiled in a row after paying a programmer to "correct" some of its Wikipedia entries. The scanner, however, can reveal as much about the controlling instincts of an organization as what its bored employees get up to during the work day. A review of edits made by CIA addresses reveals a correction to an entry on the lyrics used in a musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, while one Democrat worker for some reason altered an entry on Tim Henman. Meanwhile, someone using a Minnesota Republican Party computer cut all of the Wikipedia's entry on Harry Potter to replace it with just one line revealing the outcome of the sixth book shortly after it was published. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, told Wired News he was aware of the new service but needed time to experiment with it before commenting.