The push and pull of collective intelligence. Not everyone in the hive has the intention of truth or that information should be “free.” Thus the Wikipedia Scanner can tell us who is changing what on Wikipedia, providing a tool for what we say in New Mexico, “look how you are,” to mean that your actions are truer than your words.

See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign:

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.

Update:

Fox News, NYT personnel cleaning up Wikipedia entries?

One of the biggest gotchas in the Web 2.0 world is getting caught editing Wikipedia entries that you have some relationship with. It seems it happens nearly every day, but it’s still news when big names are discovered doing so.

That’s why analysis suggesting people at Fox News and The New York Times are guilty of making such changes could be embarrassing to both organizations.

According to the political blog DailyKos, someone at Fox News–as identified by usage of a Fox News IP Address–has “scrubbed” a series of entries having to do with several of the service’s personalities, including Brit Hume, Chris Wallace and Bill O’Reilly.

At the same time, The Times has allegedly been mucking with the Wikipedia entry on The Wall Street Journal, as well as about Rep. Tom DeLay, according to Media Bistro. And while the changes allegedly made by someone at The Times don’t directly relate to the publication, they still would most likely be considered outside the boundaries of proper Wikipedia behavior.

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