The media has been reporting on a neat tool that Virgil Griffith developed called the WikiScanner which scans the Wikipedia for entries edited by a particular domain. This has allowed people to find that people at the Department of Defence, for example, are hard at work editing the entries for abortion and the pill. The BBC has a story at Wikipedia ‘shows CIA page edits’. Wired has a story, See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign. Wired also has place you can submit interesting Wikipedia Spin Jobs.
All this raises the question of what/who is a legitimate Wikipedia author? Is there something wrong with a company editing its own entry? Isn’t the point of the open enditing to let all the various interests out there negotiate the entries?
I should add that the WikiScanner is an example of the unexpected uses of datamining. It uses information no one expected could be mined and combined to produce interesting results that can be interpreted.
Geoffrey, this is an absolute crap post! Didn’t want you to have more of the backslapping stuff. Must keep the ego in check. Now was that the comment you were looking for? 😉
Good points.
More to the discussion, a little blurb onWisebread speaks to some of the same aspects of what exactly a wiki user is. I think the point on the WikiScanner is to raise awareness that reader’s may not be consciously aware that subjects are editing their own entries. Am not sure that the noble crusade against corporate interests is really as much as it seems, but the coverage of the tool certainly has made it so.
I sense that the WikiScanner author is pointing fingers at the corporate process involved in editing as much as at Wikipedia readers’ naivete about the nature of the wiki process.