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August 14, 2007, 12:45 PM ET
Tracking Wikipedia's Not-So-Neutral Editors
When word spread last year that Congressional staff members were feverishly editing their bosses’ Wikipedia entries, Virgil Griffith asked himself a sensible question: How many company spokesmen and campus officials were doing the same thing?
The answer, as it turns out, is quite a lot. And the proof is in Mr. Griffith’s Wikipedia Scanner, a searchable database that links anonymous Wikipedia edits with the businesses and organizations from which those markups came.
Mr. Griffith, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, built the database largely from public information: He scoured Wikipedia’s own records for the Internet-protocol addresses of anonymous editors, and he then identified the owners of those addresses using a combination of public and private services.
The result is a pretty entertaining Web site — and a useful tool for students looking for insight into the inner workings of Wikipedia. Web surfers can watch as an editor from Bob Jones University calls the campus museum “the great collection of religious art in the Western Hemisphere.” And they can gasp as an official with Diebold, the company that makes a controversial line of e-voting machines, deletes wholesale a 15-paragraph section describing computer scientists’ concerns with the devices.
In a sense, Mr. Griffith’s database offers a surprisingly positive glimpse of Wikipedia: Sure, the self-interested edits often look bad, but those that most clearly seem to conflict with the site’s “neutral point of view” policy don’t tend to last too long. —Brock Read
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