If you can’t take the heat, edit your Wikipedia page.
Tuesday, August 21st by carla- Senator Whatsername is stopped late Tuesday night while driving erratically, paparazzi catch the Senator with police on tape, and Wednesday it’s all over the media. Wednesday night someone from her office edits her Wikipedia page, removing any mention of the incident and leaving only glowing highlights of her career to date.
- After 60 Minutes investigates ghost employees on the governor’s payroll, someone from his office removes all references to the interview from his Wikipedia page.
- A major defense contractor is under investigation for supplying substandard repair parts for critical defense equipment. Every time a reference to the investigation is added to the company’s Wikipedia page, someone from the company’s home office deletes it.
I know what you’re thinking: how do we know who did these edits? Wikipedia is a global encyclopedia with thousands of contributors editing millions of articles. Anyone can participate, with or without an account. Teams of editors scour pages to watch for bias, hacks, and silliness. If an edited article remains unoffensive, it’s possible no action will be taken. Sometimes an article’s bias is noted, but the article itself remains online. The edits in the hypothetical examples above could be the work of zealous supporters, and no one would know.
Until now. Virgil Griffith, a student at the Santa Fe Institute and soon to be a student at Caltech, has invented Wikiscanner, software which analyzes the IP addresses of article edits. An IP address reveals the location of the computer used to make the edit, though it can’t identify who does the typing. However, as Griffith points out, the IP address reveals that the edit comes “from someone with access to their network. If the edit occurred during working hours, then we can reasonably assume that the person is either an employee of that company or a guest that was allowed access to their network.”
An article in Wired magazine addresses the seriousness of this issue and should be required reading for every high school student who uses Wikipedia for research. Wired also tracks some overtly biased edits.
If ever there were an anticipatory set activity for a unit on Information Literacy, this is it.
