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

[Randy Burge-2]

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


By John Borland
08.14.07 | 2:00 AM
http://www.wired.com/print/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker/

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.

Share Your Sleuthing!

Cornered any companies polishing up their Wikipedia entries? Spotted
any government spooks rewriting history? Try Virgil Griffith's
Wikipedia Scanner yourself, then submit your finds and vote on other
readers' discoveries here.

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.

[snip]

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[Stephen Guerin]

Virgil was an undergrad research associate at SFI this summer:
http://www.santafe.edu/education/fellowships-undergraduate-roster-05-griffith.ph
p

-S

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Randy Burge [mailto:burge at proactiveteams.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2007 8:26 PM
> To: FRIAM
> Subject: [FRIAM] See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the
> CIA, a Campaign
>
> See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
>
>
> By John Borland
> 08.14.07 | 2:00 AM
> http://www.wired.com/print/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/
> wiki_tracker/
>
> 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.
>
> Share Your Sleuthing!
>
> Cornered any companies polishing up their Wikipedia entries?
> Spotted any government spooks rewriting history? Try Virgil
> Griffith's Wikipedia Scanner yourself, then submit your finds
> and vote on other readers' discoveries here.
>
> 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.
>
> [snip]
>
>

[Randy Burge-2]

Steve,

> Virgil was an undergrad research associate at SFI this summer:
> http://www.santafe.edu/education/fellowships-undergraduate-roster-05-griffith.
> ph
> p
>

Right recall, wrong year, it appears from the SFI web page. It looks like
Virgil was at SFI in 2005 as an undergrad at Indiana, working under Doyne's
mentorship. He is now in grad school at Cal Tech.

Perhaps you can get him back out for a WedTech sometime?


>> See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
>>
>>
>> By John Borland
>> 08.14.07 | 2:00 AM
>> http://www.wired.com/print/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/
>> wiki_tracker/
>>

>>
>> 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.