WikiScanner

» see wikiscanner.virgil.gr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In August 2007 I was a student with a TTNet line at home, and WikiScanner reached me the way it reached nearly everyone, as about a week of headlines. I never ran a query on it. Its real users were journalists, and the rest of us read what they found.

Virgil Griffith released it on 13 August 2007, and the idea behind it was small enough to explain in one sentence. Wikipedia records the IP address of every edit made without logging in, and there are commercial databases that map IP blocks to the organizations that own them. Join the two tables and you have a list of every anonymous edit made from inside a named company or a named government department.

The scale was 34,417,493 anonymous edits made between 7 February 2002 and 4 August 2007, across 187,529 organizations with at least one edit against their name. Nothing in it was secret. All of it had been sitting in Wikipedia's public edit history the entire time, in a format nobody could read at volume.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it caught ~

The results are the reason anyone remembers it. Someone at a CIA address had edited the Iraq War article, and Diebold had removed criticism of its own voting machines. The Church of Scientology had been cleaning up its own page. Somebody at Royal Dutch Shell rewrote the company description in terms that included being run by a group of geriatrics.

It traveled furthest in Australia. On 24 August 2007 the papers ran 126 anonymous edits traced back to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, mostly removing awkward detail from articles about ministers. The department said the prime minister had not directed any of it, then said later that day the edits had come from another customer of the same ISP. The Australian defense ministry took a different route and simply blocked its own staff from editing Wikipedia, in case anything they wrote was read as an official position.

~ the day it died ~

It died of its own bill. Griffith said in 2007 that running the thing cost several thousand dollars a month, which is not a sum a graduate student absorbs, so the original came down within months of launch. In 2008 he rebuilt it at Caltech with a few undergraduates as a suite called WikiWatcher, got some press again at that year's HOPE conference, and then the summer ended and there was nobody left to maintain any of it.

After that it decayed in public for years. By April 2013 the old address answered with a page identifying itself as WIKIWATCHER.COM, and the newer version timed out rather than loading at all. An open-source clone called WikiWatchdog had appeared in December 2012 from Fondazione Bruno Kessler, which is the usual fate of a tool like this. Somebody rebuilds it, and the rebuild never gets the headlines.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »