Tuesday, October 20, 2009
WikiScanner
The popular online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, is used by many people all around the world as a search engine. When first created by Jimmy Wales, he never believed that having an encyclopedia that anyone could edit would be such a hit. However, controversy soon arose when the corrections that people where making and its accuracy were being questioned. Katie Hafner, in her article, “Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits” explains how numerous of corporation were editing their companies information which led to disputes over the accuracy of its material.Companies like PepsiCo back in 2005 where deleting information that focused on its detrimental health affects. Another company like Wal-Mart also changed entries that dealt with employee compensation. This can hurt many consumers who search on Wikipedia and are misguided by the wrong information.
This all led to the invention of the WikiScanner in 2007 by Virgil Griffith. Hafner explains how this new wiki tool traces the source of millions of changes made to Wikipedia. This allows the name of the network owners to appear. That way Wikipedia knows who revised the entry and can try to further prevent corporations from manipulating their information.
Although, for big corporation it’s impossible to really find out who made the edits since the WikiScanner doesn’t give the exact name of the person who used the network. Nevertheless, the WikiScanner does give the “wikieditor” a chance to stop and consider the material that his about to modify since his network can be traceable.
Labels: Wikipedia, WikiScanner
