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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum

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From: TimF	8/14/2007 3:22:15 PM
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Tool shows who is fiddling their Wikipedia entry Wikipedia's policy of letting anyone edit an entry means mistakes can be corrected almost instantly. But how can you trust each anonymous correction to be completely unbiased? For example, you might remember the scandal caused when aides were found to have altered an entry on Wikipedia to protect the reputation of a Democratic member of Congress. Do other vested interests regularly polish their Wikipedia write-up or completely remove negative information? The answer, it seems, is yes. A new online tool called Wikipedia Scanner lets you check for yourself. It automatically compares the IP address logged when someone makes an anonymous Wikipedia edit to a public database of IP addresses belonging to all sorts of corporations and government bodies. CalTech student Virgil Griffith created the tool in an attempt to discover more controversies. So far, his software has revealed some minor wiki-fiddling. For instance, someone at Diebold, a company that makes electronic voting machines, deleted chunks of negative information about its products, although this was quickly corrected by other editors. Another fiddler at Wal-Mart apparently made tweaks to polish the company's image. Perhaps the most startling revelation is that someone at the CIA corrected an entry about the lyrics used in a musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It makes the agency seem altogether less sinister. newscientist.com wikiscanner.virgil.gr

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