This is sort of funny. Apparently, somebody at FOX "News" didn't like what their Wikipedia entry said about them, and so they used a computer at FOX to delete whole sections, and tart up others. And they aren't the only ones!
This is a pretty cool story about a smart college kid who's developed a program to sniff out just who is editing Wikipedia. It is, of course an open-source forum--people are allowed to edit these pages. But there is a little more going on here than making the entries more accurate. Read on.
[Excerpt]
See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
By John Borland
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. . .
Read the rest at Wired.com
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