underhanded editors

Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.

New ‘WikiScanner’ exposes underhanded editors

Wikipedia touts itself as the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” but a new online tool now makes it harder for those with an agenda to edit it in a sneaky fashion.

Ordinarily Wikipedia allows anyone to edit its articles, and the encyclopedia has become a target for vandals, revisionists and spin doctors. In an effort to keep Wikipedia more honest, U.S. graduate student Virgil Griffiths created WikiScanner, a site that can trace the IP addresses of computers that have made edits to Wikipedia entries in the last five years.

This really makes a difference to me, as some idiots have returned errors to pages I’ve fixed up, and I would like to be able to track it.