WikiScanner

WikiScanner is a tool created by Virgil Griffith for searching anonymous Wikipedia edits by organizations. It uses the publicly displayed IP addresses associated with all edits on Wikipedia. The service has been used to track Wikipedia edits from organizations like The New York Times, the CIA and the Al-Jazeera network.

Fast Facts

1. Noncommercial web site
2. Does not work for edits made by logged in users
3. Took 2.5 weeks to develop¹
4. Uses the ip2location database to connect IP addresses with organizations
5. Database contains 34,417,493 anonymous edits dating from February 7, 2002 to August 4, 2007.
6. Created by Virgil Griffith
7. Griffith is on a quest to become #1 result on Google for a "Virgil" search
8. Griffith was sued in 2003 for a paper revealing security vulnerabilities with Blackboard Inc. software.²

Quotes

"The low barrier to entry for adding new content is vital to Wikipedia's rapid growth. Drastically increasing the effort and commitment required to add new information would be disastrous. Instead of stopping anonymous contributions, Wikipedia should (continue to) use various back-end analyses (such as WikiScanner) that will help counteract disinformation while keeping the low barrier to contribution. Overall--especially for non-controversial topics--Wikipedia already works. For controversial topics, Wikipedia can be made more reliable through techniques like this one." Virgil Griffith¹

"It's awesome-I love it...It brings an additional level of transparency to what's going on at Wikipedia...[WikiScanner] uses information we've been making publicly available forever, hoping someone would do something like this." Jimmy Wales³

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