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

[The Sushi Bandit]

http://www.wired.com/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.

[mike_c]

1. this is not a problem....

I'm sorry, but the implied outrage over this is dragging my buzz tonight. Instead, I'd suggest that this should be EXPECTED and ENCOURAGED. When folks edit Wikipedia or other similar collaborative documents the information they change does not go away forever, and the edit trail is itself quite useful information about social consensus, information manipulation, and so on. By its very openness Wikipedia invites this sort of thing, but at the same time constitutes a kind of honey trap for trolls. Better to understand them, and their roles in information management, than to simply let them pull our strings unobserved.

Besides, if open communities like Wikipedia are to succeed at their primary objectives, the community must be resilient against this sort of manipulation. You cannot have an open community if you try to stop this sort of thing-- instead, we need to learn how to recognize it and deal with it, incorporate it and understand it.

[Berry Cool]

2. Trolls have no role in "information management" except to destroy it.

Their specialty is "misinformation management."

[The Sushi Bandit]

3. K&R