Who are the Wikipedia censors?
p2pnet news | Freedom:- What do the US House Of Representatives, Democratics, Republicans, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Wal-Mart Stores, the Fox News Channel, the New York Times, the CIA, Church of Scientology and the Vatican have in common?
Before I tell you, I’ve been sued for defamation – twice – because I believe freedom of speech is the most fundamental of all human rights.
I allow anyone, anywhere, to post anything on p2pnet without fear that one day I might tell someone who they are. I can’t, and no court can make me.
Because I honestly don’t know.
I have no idea who posts what, and nor do I keep logs of Reader’s Writes, as I call comments. So I was intrigued to learn about Virgil Griffith, a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute.
Back to to the list of apparently disparate bodies in the intro, they’re linked by virtue of the fact they’ve all used Griffith’s WikiScanner, a brilliantly concerived application custom-built to ferret through Wikipedia to find who’s behind editorial changes.
List anonymous wikipedia edits from interesting organizations, it says.
Why did Griffith, who’s 24, create the Wikiscanner? “To improve virgil.gr ’s Google pagerank for the query ‘virgil’,’ he says, going on he also wanted to, “Create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike” and, “See what ‘interesting organizations’ (which I am neutral toward), are up to.”
Not only bnut also, “Every time I hear about a new security vulnerability, I look to see if it can be done on a massive scale and indexed.”
In the FAQ:
Do we *really* know these edits came from <insert company here>’s executives or their lackies?
Technically, we don’t know if it came from an agent of that company. However, we do know that edit came from someone with access to their network. If the edit occurred during working hours, then we can reasonably assume that the person is either an employee of that company or a guest that was allowed access to their network.
Do you have examples of blatant misinformation being injected into Wikipedia?
As someone who has experienced the legal system being turned against them in unexpected ways, for legal reasons I am not providing any commentary or lists of particularly juicy edits. All of the tools are there for you to find them yourself without much trouble. I’ve provided the tool as well as an “Editor’s Picks” list of interesting organizations to get you thinking. Furthermore, Wired already has clearinghouse for juicy edits on their 27bstroke6 blog . There’s also a nice list of edits at MaltaStar .
What kind of vandalism and disinformation have you found?
Without naming any names, I’ve found three common kinds of vandalism.
1. Wholesale removal of entire paragraphs of critical information. (common for both political figures and corporations)
2. White-washing — replacing negative/neutral adjectives with positive adjectives that mean something similar. (common for political figures)
3. Adding negative information to a competitor’s page. (common for corporations)
Griffith says he came up with the idea after hearing about congressmen, “getting caught for white-washing their wikipedia pages.
His FAQ also asks, “Is something like WikiScanner required to keep people honest?” and “Is anonymity bad for Wikipedia?”
He answers:
I think one of the core messages of the cypherpunk movement is that anonymous speech is important and should be preserved.
So no, I do not believe something like WikiScanner, which identifies people, is necessary. Overall – especially for non-controversial topics – Wikipedia already works. For controversial topics, Wikipedia can be made more reliable through techniques like this one. For any sort of “open” project, I strongly prefer allowing people to remain anonymous while also doing various back-end analyses to counteract vandalism and disinformation.
“According to a CIA spokesperson, the U.S. Intelligence agency is editing Wikipedia pages in order to save Americans lives,” says OhMyNews.
“Between June 29, 2004, and July 30, 2007, Wikipedia pages have been edited 297 times by some individual(s) using computers that belong to the CIA network.”
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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August 24th, 2007 at 10:13 am
“I believe freedom of speech is the most fundamental of all human rights.”
Then why do you delete my comments whenever I say “shit” or “fuck”?