See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign

By John Borland

CalTech graduate student Virgil Griffith built a search tool that traces IP addresses of those who make Wikipedia changes.
Photo: Jake Appelbaum

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.

"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.

This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information.

The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.

The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia, including records of all these changes.

Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.

Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.

Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President Bush.

The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."

A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter but could not comment by press time.

Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in, changing a lineciting a "definitive" study showing Wal-Mart raised the total number of jobs in a community. that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves activist criticism on community impact intact, while

As has been previously reported, politician's offices are heavy users of the system. Former Montana Sen. Conrad Burns' office, for example, apparently changed one critical paragraph headed "A controversial voice" to "A voice for farmers," with predictably image-friendly content following it.

Perhaps interestingly, many of the most apparently self-interested changes come from before 2006, when news of the Congressional offices' edits reached the headlines. This may indicate a growing sophistication with the workings of Wikipedia over time, or even the rise of corporate Wikipedia policies.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told Wired News he was aware of the new service, but needed time to experiment with it before commenting.

The vast majority of changes are fairly innocuous, however. Employees at the CIA's net address, for example, have been busy -- but with little that would indicate their place of apparent employment, or a particular bias.

One entry on "Black September in Jordan" contains wholesale additions, with specific details that read like a popular history book or an eyewitness' memoir.

Many more are simple copy edits, or additions to local town entries or school histories. One CIA entry deals with the details of lyrics sung in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode.

Griffith says he launched the project hoping to find scandals, particularly at obvious targets such as companies like Halliburton. But there's a more practical goal, too: By exposing the anonymous edits that companies such as drugs and big pharmaceutical companies make in entries that affect their businesses, it could help experts check up on the changes and make sure they're accurate, he says.

For now, he has just scratched the surface of the database of millions of entries. But he's putting it online so others can look too.

The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not respond to e-mail and telephone inquiries Monday.

Wikipedia: "A Work in Progress"

The online encyclopedia's founder Jimmy Wales talks about the steps being taken to foil fraudulent

By Burt Helm

Wikipedia: "A Work in Progress"

The online encyclopedia's founder Jimmy Wales talks about the steps being taken to foil fraudulent entries

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia is awash in controversy. The imbroglio was touched off by an anonymously written biography entry that linked former USA Today Editor John Seigenthaler Sr. with the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The writer, Brian Chase, has issued an apology for a prank he says went terribly awry. Seigenthaler, in a Nov. 29 USA Today editorial, criticized Wikipedia and called the fake biography "Internet character assassination."

The incident has cast doubt on the credibility of Wikipedia, which lets users anonymously create new articles and edit existing entries -- which number more than 1 million in 10 languages. On Dec. 7, New York Times Business Editor Larry Ingrassia sent a memo urging his staff not to use the site to check information. And on Dec. 12, a group based in Long Beach, N.Y., announced it would pursue a class action against the site to represent those "who believe that they have been defamed or who have been the subject of anonymous and malicious postings to the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia."

The encyclopedia is designed to be self-policing, allowing the public to weigh in and correct inaccuracies. But the Seigenthaler entry "slipped through the cracks," says Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder and president of Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia. The site is taking steps to prevent a recurrence, he says. Those include barring unregistered users from creating new pages. Wales spoke with BusinessWeek Online's Burt Helm on Dec. 13. Edited excerpts from their conversation follow:

What happened with Seigenthaler's biography?
It slipped through the cracks. In the community, we have what we call a New Pages Patrol -- they put new entries in a category and add links and so on. They just weren't able to keep up with how many new pages were coming online every day. It wasn't what was supposed to happen at that stage in the process.

Since then, we've decided that we want to slow down the creation of new pages, so starting in January we're preventing unregistered users from creating new pages, because so often those have to be deleted.

About how many people use and contribute to Wikipedia?
The number I like to talk about is the number of very active editors -- those that do the bulk of the work. As of October, there were about 1,850 for the English version of Wikipedia, and 4,573 worldwide. We don't know how many unique users visit the site because we're lame and don't keep track of it -- we don't sell advertising, so we don't have to. But we get about 2.5 billion page views per month.

How should users view Wikipedia? Do you think they should consider it authoritative?
It should be thought of as a work in progress -- it's our intention to be Britannica or better quality, and our policies and everything are designed with that goal in mind. We don't reach that quality yet -- we know that. We're a work in progress.

Do you think students and researchers should cite Wikipedia?
No, I don't think people should cite it, and I don't think people should cite Britannica, either -- the error rate there isn't very good. People shouldn't be citing encyclopedias in the first place. Wikipedia and other encyclopedias should be solid enough to give good, solid background information to inform your studies for a deeper level. And really, it's more reliable to read Wikipedia for background than to read random Web pages on the Internet.

Seigenthaler's main criticism of Wikipedia is that contributors are allowed to edit and add to articles anonymously. Why do you feel it's important to allow contributors and site administrators to remain anonymous?
There are two reasons I would put forward. First, on the Internet, it's impossible to actually confirm people's identity in the first place, short of getting credit-card information. On any site it's very easy to come up with a fake identity, regardless.

Second, there are definitely people working in Wikipedia who may have privacy reasons for not wanting their name on the site. For example, there are people working on Wikipedia from China, where the site is currently blocked. We have a contributor in Iran who has twice been told his name has been turned into the police for his work in Wikipedia. He's brave. His real name is known, actually. But there are lots of reasons for privacy online that aren't nefarious.

Doesn't the anonymity open the door for easy slander and libel?
I would say, in general, no. In a certain respect, when you have any kind of Web site with broad public participation -- Web forums, unmoderated mailing lists, comments on blogs, blogs themselves -- there's always the potential that someone is going to write something nasty. It doesn't mean that we're perfect, of course, but the difference at Wikipedia is you have a community that's empowered to do something about it.

Wikipedia 'shows CIA page edits'

An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries.

Jimmy Wales: 2 Million Articles Down and More to Do

SOURCE: NEW YORK TIMES

At the Wikimania conference in Taipei, this weekend there was a group of volunteers active in editing the online encyclopedia who started calling themselves “The Old-Codgers Coalition.” Like many at the conference, they were trying to cope with the impact of the site’s popularity.

These days, Wikipedia editors bandy various guidelines and rules of thumb for assessing the merit of articles. The old codgers have proudly followed the credo “Ignore All Rules.”

Success has also meant that there is less so-called “low-hanging fruit,” articles to write from scratch about important subjects. And finally, success means that Wikipedia has become too big for states around the world to ignore.

In an interview on Friday in Taipei, Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, discussed the burden of popularity.

QUESTION: With its popularity, is the Wikipedia project losing steam?

JIMMY WALES: One of the concerns we had early on was, how long can this be sustained and how long is this fun for volunteers. There was a time when you could go – you know how when you link to something in Wikipedia and the article doesn’t exist, it is a red link and you click on the red link and it says edit this page. So I remember when Africa was a red link. And you could click on Africa and you could type, “Africa is a continent” hit save and you were the pioneer who discovered Africa. Obviously now that is not true anymore.

For nearly two million topics in English there already is some kind of an article. And it gets to be problematic in some areas, if you think philosophically, how many articles could there legitimately be in Wikipedia. That’s a question I am smart enough never to answer. Because any answer I would make is inevitably doomed to be a classic mistake. … Just last year, at Wikimania in Boston, there was a guy from Poland who brought … a big book in Polish, it was a concise biography book of 20,000 notable Polish people. And what he had done is he had gone through this book and made a random selection, flipping through, of like 100 names. And he checked in English Wikipedia to see how many of those names had been covered and it was less than 2 percent. Some of these were … the ones naturally enough, Lech Walesa, people who we would know, but the mayor of Warsaw in 1868. We have nothing.

QUESTION: And it should?

JIMMY WALES: And it should. And it could. There is no reason why it couldn’t. On the other hand, who is going to write that exactly? Well, somebody is. There are Polish history buffs out there. There are also people who say, “Give me a list and I’ll work on it.” Here is a list of all the mayors of Warsaw and I will go through and find what I can find. There will be short articles maybe. So those kind of things are legitimate and still remain to be done. Lots and lots of stuff like that. So in the early days I worried if participation would fall once it gets big. Well, participation doesn’t seem to be falling. The kind of work that needs to be done is of a different type. It is kind of interesting.

QUESTION: So there is still more to write?

JIMMY WALES: There is always the contemporary news, contemporary topics that need updating, and that can be lots of things. One thing I have looked at before is that when we started the project we thought we could use the 1911 Britannica which is in the public domain. Use that as a base to get some articles. And frankly they were unusable. They were just out of date. So you would think, if the article is Julius Caesar, how much could have changed. A whole lot, frankly. Since 1911 a lot of our understanding of historical things has changed dramatically with discoveries in archeology and things like this. If you go digging around in 1911 Britannica you would get that white, male, colonial view of the world that shines through in surprising places. Things do change, even with something like Julius Caesar. You would think, gosh the Wikipedia article must be basically done. But I am sure it has been edited several times in the last week.

So it seems we have lots to do, but I still wonder in the long run, do people lose interest. I remember when we were drawing close to 1,000,000 articles and I was extrapolating when that might happen. It was not that close to April Fool’s Day but I remember thinking if we cross on April Fool’s Day I am going to send out a post to everyone saying, that was fun. I deleted everything. Let’s do it again. Start over. That was good. We’ll do it right this time.

QUESTION: Is quality still a big concern?

JIMMY WALES: In the English Wikipedia there has been a huge focus in the last year, particularly in biographies, which is where I really placed a lot of emphasis. As we have gotten bigger, and the low-hanging fruit is gone, now people are writing biographies on less and less famous people, which is harder and harder. … it gets really touchy for people. It gets harder to maintain. In general, speaking very broadly, you can write anything you want about Michael Jackson because he is over it. George W. Bush, he’s over it. He really doesn’t care what Wikipedia says about him. You probably do. … For one thing, it will be the No. 2 link in Google. And it feels very historical. This is my epitaph, in a certain sense. This is who I am. It sums up my life in three paragraphs. And if there is an error you are going to be annoyed.

Particularly there are certain people who are famous for being controversial. And so that gets very touchy. Though certain people, like Ann Coulter, I met her. I chatted with her. And she was not happy with her biography but what she was not happy about was surprising.

QUESTION: It was too short?

JIMMY WALES: Somebody had written that she was raised as a Catholic. And she wasn’t. And someone said she had gotten money from the Mellons or somebody and she hadn’t. But all the sort of, she says these outrageous things, that was fine. She accepts that. She knows her position in the culture. She didn’t say, how dare you say I made this inflammatory remark. That’s what she does. There are a lot of people who maybe aren’t that comfortable. So the community has taken this to heart and we have become much more rigorous about sourcing.

QUESTION: What sort of impact do you think Wikipedia has made?

JIMMY WALES: There was a young man who was assigned to drive me around when I was here in Taiwan last time and he told me that he had been raised in a very Taiwanese nationalist family. He told me he was raised with the very basic belief that the mainlanders had been brainwashed and had all the wrong history and he told me that now that he has been working on Wikipedia and he has met a lot of them he said, I still think they are wrong about a lot of things but I can kind of see they have a point here and there. And it was interesting to me because this was a young man who has moved from thinking of the other as some sort of mysterious, brainwashed masses to going oh, actually, these are people like me. That’s just one person, but this spirit is reflected, hopefully, in Wikipedia. And that is kind of a microcosm of what is going on bigger picture around the world. There is a real spirit of global humanity that begins to transcend other things.

I don’t want to get too utopian here. There is a great book. Marc Andreessen gave me this book called “The Victorian Internet,” which is a fabulous read. And it’s about the telegraph system. The book makes the argument that the telegraph in its day was much more revolutionary than the Internet is in our day. Because … it took a month to get a message from England to New York and New York was a week and half. And suddenly that became instant in the space of 10 years. And so the author goes back and reviews a lot of the hype of that era. They sort of had their own Internet bubble back then. There were a lot of utopia arguments back then that really echo some of the stuff you read today. People would say, now that universally acknowledged, I think today, that kings and governments go to war by getting ordinary people to hate the others. So the argument was made that now that people can communicate directly, so the English can speak with the French, one Englishman can speak to an ordinary Frenchman directly in real time by sending messages back and forth we will have a deeper understanding and then we will have no more war. The 20^th century came and it was pretty much a fiasco.

So whenever I hear myself waxing too poetic about the world coming together, there is a cautionary face to say, well, the technology doesn’t automatically make that happen, we really have to think about how to encourage those kinds of things. I do think it absolutely makes a difference.

Wikimania: What a Future? NEW YOURK TIMES

After three days at the Wikimania gathering of Wikipedia contributors in Taipai, with dozens of panels and presentations and even more chats in the hallways, it’s clear to me that the Wikipedia phenomenon can only be understood through contradictions. Here are some of the puzzles that may lead to enlightenment:

Why contribute: happiness or victory?

In a keynote address, Joi ito tried to explain why Wikipedia works as well as it does by citing the Dalai Lama’s distinction between pleasure and happiness. Seeking transitory pleasure is what professionals do by working for the Man (don’t I know it); seeking happiness is what drives the amateurs who have built Wikipedia.

Happy, perhaps, but they are competitive too. Serious Wikipedians keep track of the number of “edits” they have made to the site as if it were a video game score. One attendee I met from England let it be known that he was No. 2 on the Wikipedia scoreboard. Read more …

Wikimani