The Wikipedia Conundrum
As has been plastered all over the blogosphere last week, a Cal Tech grad student named Virgil Griffith has created a web-based tool called the WikiScanner that essentially lays bare the legitimate extent of one criticism consistently leveled against the user-created-and-maintained web-based encylopedia: can it be trusted as a source for information?
Many bloggers (yours truly included) and regular people alike reference Wikipedia entries religiously. It serves as the next best thing to having a random friend who just so happens to be an expert on the absurdly esoteric topic you chose to write about. However, because any entry is open to any other user for editing at any time, there are long-standing, open-ended attempts to undermine its validity and usefulness as a reference tool.
Certain speculation became harsh reality last week when Griffith’s tool was put to immediate use by netizens looking to uncover some truth to back their conspiracy theories. Check the WIRED article from August 14th by clicking here.
A quote from the article:
Wikipedia Scanner — the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith — offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.
Inspired by news last year that Congress members’ offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.
“Everything’s better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it,” he says with a grin.
But what he uncovered was so vast and widespread - it’s both unconscionable as well as unfathomable that anyone would seriously doubt corporations’ capacity to exploit this glaring loophole in the world’s most popular public information recepticle.
See the running tally of WIRED.com’s noteworthy edits to Wiki entries by clicking here.
I will admit that this article began as a Fox News witch-hunt on my part, partly because when this tool first popped up, I’m sure that was one of the first companies on the list to check by the blogosphere and generally liberally biased netizens.
So that is what I first read about. But the extent of this is much more far-reaching than simply the usual insidious behavior most have come to expect of the slime running Fox News. And believe me, though the list of US based corporations that altered the Wikipedia public record for the benefit of their own image is vast, the list of edits perpetrated by Fox News is likely the most sinister and malicious of the bunch.
For a rundown of everything edited by Fox News, click here for a painstakingly composed complete listing.
Keith Olberman provides an interesting slant on the issue in this YouTube clip as someone personally affected by Fox’s edits:
And perhaps the most tragically predictable element to Fox News’ involvement here is their response to the findings, which can be viewed or downloaded by clicking here.
But back to the larger issue at hand. The list also includes such high profile violators as the CIA, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Best Buy, Diebold (the company that designed the famed voting machines in Florida at the center of the 2000 US election scandal), Starbucks, the BBC, The New York Times, Pepsi, the NRA, the ACLU, the NYPD, the Israeli Embassy in the US, Nintendo, CNET…
You get the point.
There is no consistency in agenda between those various perpetrators except the common interest of utilizing the supposed anonymity of the Internet to manipulate public opinion in their favor. The notion that Wikipedia takes an IP fingerprint of every post screams as a warning light to all of the above companies that somehow, some way, the information is there for someone to catch them red-handed.
Furthermore, the notion that someone with the time and the know-how could simply download the entire Wikipedia database (including edits, which is available to anyone who wants it) and cross-reference that list with one of the many public tools that maps IP addresses to their registered owners seems like a simplistic one - an inevitable one, even.
Yet the window of opportunity to freely subvert an institution that had risen to prominence so quickly was too good to pass up. Here was a development in cyberspace on the scale of Amazon or Ebay, only in terms of information sharing as opposed to commerce. An instant sensation that became as commonplace as “Google” when thinking of where to first attempt to find any information
Who would ever find out?
Well..the inevitable happened rather quickly and now PR departments are left scrambling for excuses. To be fair, it is just as likely that someone with a personal agenda who just so happened to be on a computer at work at a given company when making a singularly motivated anonymous edit on Wikipedia, but in many instances, the connections are too much to write off to such coincidence.
In much of the reporting on the matter, however, it is easy to condemn Wikipedia because it is easy to ignore the vigilance of the Wikipedia community. This angle was not overlooked by the WIRED News representative interviewed by Olberman, and it is critical to the survival of Wikipedia as the household name that it is.
To me, what is more interesting than the shooting gallery of opportunity presenting itself to lay into any of the corporations on the list of perpetrators is the fact that many of the changes made were quickly reversed within the Wikiverse. There are legions of people who take the honor system extremely seriously and they are constantly patrolling anonymous edits looking for anything out of the ordinary.
As Wachowskian as it sounds, they are the true gatekeepers in the sense that they enforce the strict code of conduct that maintains Wikipedia’s relevance to society. The edits themselves are appalling in nature but the critical realization here is the context in which they occur. Safeguards do exist. Wikipedia is not rampant with decay as it becomes exposed to more and more people.
Still…
While there was clearly nothing illegal about what the likes of Fox News and others did, I’m curious what the end-result will be for these entities. Most likely nothing will change in that this information will not reach those that it would truly enlighten and it is preaching to the choir for most of those that have followed the story developments closely.
But to those that feel that the ultimate safeguard has been enacted with the introduction of the WikiScanner, do not forget that there are certainly individuals or entities out there who have figured out how to truly remain anonymous when making edits. IP masking is not a new concept and even though Wiki does record certain transactional attributes, it does still rely on something of an honor system, which always leaves the door open for someone even remotely clever to exploit.
I personally would love to rest easy that anything I find in the Wikiverse is triple certified, but it appears that at least in the short-term, there are no guarantees. Of course, there are millions of entries to do with topics that no one in their right mind would have a vested interest in skewing or misleading others on. It is fantastic for music and other pop-culture related items in this sense.
As far as the big picture, though, the fact remains that Wikipedia is organic. It is living, breathing, and constantly evolving directly parallel to the experiences and observations of anyone in the world with a computer and internet access. Because it has a staff of a billion researches and editors, no other privately published collection could ever scratch the surface of the Wikiverse in terms of breadth and scope.
I sincerely hope that the gatekeepers continue their good work because even a 98% accurate Wikipedia is better than most anything else out there. I have to believe that this is one instance where the pure propagation of knowledge and information will always take precedence as an ideal amongst a vast majority compared to the minority that seeks to pervert this service.
Or am I just being naive? Very curious to hear others’ thoughts on the matter…especially those with experience as a Wiki moderator.
Stumble it!
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