Who will edit Wiki's editors?

Anyone with the inclination can alter entries on the online encyclopedia, but a scanner that can track who's making changes could curb the practice, writes Katie Hafner.

Last year someone edited the Wikipedia entry for the SeaWorld theme parks in the United States to change all mentions of "orcas" to "killer whales", insisting this was a more accurate name for the species.

There was another, unexplained edit: a critical paragraph about SeaWorld's "lack of respect toward its orcas" had disappeared. Both changes, it turns out, originated at a computer at Anheuser-Busch, SeaWorld's owner.

Dozens of similar examples of insider editing came to light last week through WikiScanner, a new website that traces the source of millions of changes to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate and hacker, Virgil Griffith, 24, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the internet protocol address of the editor's network.

The address information was already available on Wikipedia, but the new site makes it much easier to connect those numbers with the names of network owners.

Since Wired News first wrote about WikiScanner last week, internet users have spotted plenty of interesting changes to Wikipedia by people at non-profit groups and government entities, such as the CIA. Many of the most obviously self-interested edits have originated from company networks.

Griffith, who likes to refer to himself as a "disruptive technologist", said he was certain that many more examples of self-interested editing would come out in the next few weeks "because the data set is just so huge".

More help is on the way. Griffith said he is working on some ideas to help users "drill down to the good stuff faster". WikiScanner compares 5.3 million edits on Wikipedia against the internet addresses of more than 2 million companies or individuals.

Griffith's interest in writing the software, which took him two weeks, came after he heard that members of Congress were editing their own entries.

Griffith said he is "expecting a few people to get nailed pretty hard" after his service became public. "The yield, in terms of public relations disasters, is about what I expected."

In the virtual world, Griffith's own listing on Wikipedia reveals he is also known as Romanpoet, "an American hacker best known for his involvement with a 2003 lawsuit with the Blackboard Inc company", which centred on a security flaw in a university magnetic ID card system called Buzzcard.

Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation that runs Wikipedia, said the site had a policy that discouraged such "conflict of interest" editing. "We don't make it an absolute rule," he said, "but it's definitely a guideline."

Internet experts, for the most part, have welcomed WikiScanner.

"I'm very glad that this has been exposed," said Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School. "Wikipedia is a reliable first stop for getting information about a huge variety of things........

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