Malicious Wiki Edits Exposed!

WikiScanner reveals who’s been cleaning up their own pages and slamming the competition someone at the BBC seems to think Dubya’s middle name is Wanker. A new program called WikiScanner (http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/), which automatically matches Wikipedia edits to the IP addresses they came from, reveals instances of vandalism, whitewashing, and trickery by everyone from the FBI to the Vatican to the BBC. While most of the edits are mild and quickly rectified, others are more insidious. Users from Exxon, Microsoft, and the Turkish government have been caught removing references to, respectively, the ecological impact of the Exxon Valdez spill, Xbox 360 failure rates, and the Armenian genocide. WikiScanner, which was written by grad student Virgil Griffith, shows that not all users of the peer-edited encyclopedia have transparency in mind. Thankfully, finding these conflict-of-interest edits just got a whole lot easier.