Who put the we in the wikipedia?

Sat 25 Aug 2007 09:10 AM

Ron alerted me to the existence of Wikipedia Scanner, a service that does the reverse lookup to follow anonymous Wikipedia edits back to their source. As one might expect, it has turned up a number cases in which corporations actively manipulated their own entries. You can get details from Wired-- or almost anywhere else, for that matter. It's already been on Colbert, making this post about two weeks behind the wave.

As someone sceptical about Wikipedia, I feel like I should have something to say about Wiki Scanner. For example, I could point out that doing reverse lookup on IP addresses only works so long as MegaHugeConglomoco does their wiki hatchet work from the corporate office. If they have it done by their PR firm or by employees telecommuting from their homes, Wiki Scanner won't make the connection. And surely any company playing Wikipedia chameleon now will make specific efforts to disguise their involvement.

All of that means that Wiki Scanner cannot generate any reliable statistics about how many organizations are manipulating Wikipedia, how many entries are manipulated, or how many manipulations remain in the present Wikipedia corpus. It sifts out anecdotes of specific abuses. Although illustrative, these anecdotes are about what one would have expected. Of course, it would be fun if it turned up some singular surprises.

Addendum Sep7

Mark alerts me to Wikipedia trust coloring, software designed to indicate trustworthiness of stretches of text in the Wikipedia. It does so by effectively making the entry history manifest in a single page. The presupposition is that text that has been in the Wikipedia through more edits is more likely to be true, or at least that users are more reliable if text they write persists through more edits.

As Mark puts it:

Now we know, in addition to <some guy said so>, that <some guy said so without other guys bothering to say not-so>.

Or better: to `some guy said so,' we add `no guy said no' (at least so said the log file); so we're better in the know.

No?

No. I mean... yes.