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CIA, Wal-Mart, Fox News Purge Wiki Entries

Hacker reveals vanity changes to online encyclopedia articles

By Jonas Oransky,  Newser Staff

Posted Aug 14, 2007 1:33 PM CDT

(Newser) – A new data-mining tool has tracked the identities of the anonymous users who make edits to Wikipedia entries—and revealed that Wal-Mart, voting-machine magnate Diebold, and even Fox News have tried to bowdlerize or spin their appearances in the online encyclopedia. And they're not the only ones, Wired reports.

The program's creator, a California grad student, was inspired by reports last year that congresspeople were flushing out their entries; he downloaded all 5.3M edits and matched up their IP addresses—a permanent digital footprint—with their sources. Some big-name organizations appear to have made somewhat innocuous changes: CIA employees altered details in an entry about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Virgil Griffith, hacker and CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student, and now inventor of the Wikipedia Scanner, a process by which heavily-biased edits might be identified and traced.
Virgil Griffith, hacker and CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student, and now inventor of the Wikipedia Scanner, a process by which heavily-biased edits might be identified and traced.   (Public Domain)
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, answers a question during an interview with the Associated Press Friday, June 29, 2007 in St. Petersburg, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, answers a question during an interview with the Associated Press Friday, June 29, 2007 in St. Petersburg, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)   (Associated Press)
Thanks to Virgil Griffith's Wikipedia Scanner, changes to Wikipedia entries can be monitored and possibly traced.
Thanks to Virgil Griffith's Wikipedia Scanner, changes to Wikipedia entries can be monitored and possibly traced.   ((c) pedrugo)
Wikipedia Founder Speaks At Education Conference.
Wikipedia Founder Speaks At Education Conference.   (Getty Images)
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