Wiki-Buffoon-Foolery

It warms the cockles of my heart to see LFG and others tracking down corrupt Wiki editors in this fashion; catching Al-Jazeera and other likewise culprits repetitiously editing Wiki. My oh My. Now who would’ve thunk it.

Here’s a very interesting tool built by Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith, which searches the list of edits at Wikipedia and correlates them with known IP addresses of groups and organizations—revealing edits made by The New York Times and Al Jazeera, among others: List anonymous wikipedia edits from interesting organizations.

The site is currently struggling under high traffic, so it may not be available; but you probably won’t be surprised to learn that someone at Al Jazeera has been adding blatantly anti-Israel statements to many Wikipedia pages, or that the New York Times has been sanitizing their own page.

Another interesting IP to look up is the Reuters Canary Wharf office, the origin of a death threat sent to LGF last year. Someone using that IP has been going around Wikipedia and editing entries related to Islam; before the site went down, I discovered several places in which that IP had inserted the word “Prophet” in front of “Muhammad,” for example. Here’s the Reuters IP search.

Here’s an article at Wired: See Who’s Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign.

Hat Tip: AGX-EIE