There's been a growing buzz about Virgil Griffith's WikiScanner for several weeks, but it didn't catch my eye -- or ear -- until I listened today to an Aug 22 podcast from the Chronicle of Higher Ed, featuring an interview of Griffith himself.
WikiScanner, in the simplest terms, is a database that maps the IP address of Wikipedia editors to the organizations that own those IPs, allowing users to search for dodgy editing practices by members of those organizations. Griffith, hesitant to name individual corporations or individuals, describes a general "whitewashing" of a number of Wikipedia articles on corporations and political figures.
(If you want to take WikiScanner for a spin, here it is. )
Since WikiScanner launched--in early August--journalists, bloggers, and conspiracy nerds everywhere have been scrambling to catch The Man red-handed. The most comical example, in my opinion, is a Sony employee caught editing a page for Halo 3, the anticipated game by rival publisher Microsoft, set to release later this month. "[Halo 3] won't look any better than Halo 2," wrote the Sony insider, although the edit was quickly removed.
Aside from the cool factor, and the stick-it-to-The-Man factor, why is this technology interesting?
For starters, it raises a huge challenge to authority over the control of information. To a large extend, Wikipedia's Truth-by-Consensus model of information was doing this already, but WikiScanner takes it a step further. Instead of simply saying everyone can participate in the recording of information about our world, WikiScanner says everyone can participate in the recording of information about our world, but if you participate in a specific way, on behalf of an institution of power, your participation will be nullified AND ridiculed. That's a pretty significant shift.
I'm also amused by the transference that is happening, in terms of the actions of individuals being interpreted as the actions of corporations. The tacit assumption in the coverage of this story appears to be that the Halo 3 edit described above was made with the approval of Sony, that the anonymous employee was acting on behalf of his company. If the same employee had written "Halo 3 won't look any better than Halo 2" in a bathroom stall at the mall, would we assume that he was speaking on behalf of Sony just because his business card had fallen on the floor? Not likely, and yet the digital -- and highly public -- nature of Wikipedia triggers a different response.
On the other hand, catching someone at the Vatican editing Gerry Adams' entry is certainly suspicious. As are employees of Fox News editing entries on Al Franken.
I think this is a really fascinating wrinkle in the various Wiki-related debates about authority, authorship, and "facts," so I hope to hear some comments from our readers.
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Submitted by Brad Weikel on Thu, 09/06/2007 - 11:04.
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Shh. Don't look at me!
Is this just a momentary hiccup in public-wiki-goodness? WikiScanner is, of course, limited by IP connection information, and IP addresses are easily obfuscated and/or vague. I work on any number IP addresses in a given day and would easily be able to have edits traced to Georgetown, my employeer (via Quest), undergradutate institution (via UNet), or (and most disguising) Comcast.
Virgil was asked if he thought WikiScanner would just result in people being "more sneaky", to which he replied:
"Unlikely. Even though dusting for fingerprints is well-known and has been around for decades, police still dust for prints at crime scenes, and it often works!" (http://virgil.gr/31.html)
I am not so sure. Homicide seems like a poor comparison to Wiki-Vandalism. It will probably rest on whether these tactics become streamlined into online PR and content management (which seems likely), or remain the practice of DC interns trying to get ahead.
With internet architecture configured the way it is, one thing is for certain: There are countless edits that can never be meaningfully traced. Afterall, how many of us use Comcast or Verizon? How many of us use dynamic IP addresses? This IP address (24.126.106.228), for example, is owned by Comcast and is traced to a hub in Arlington, VA.
www.whatknows.com/blog
Is it worth it for companies?
I agree that WikiScanner is, quite obviously, limited, and that it will cause some people to be "more sneaky" with their Wiki-Vandalism -- in the same sort of technological arms races we've seen with virus scanners, spam filters, and DRM -- but what interests me the most here is the link to corporate entities and public relations.
I find it highly unlikely that corporations are participating in any sort of top-down, conspiratorial whitewashing of Wikipedia, and I find it comical that some of the coverage of this story has made that suggestion.
Rather, the "whitewashing" edits are almost certainly being made by autonomous individuals within those corporations. Sure, they are operating from biased and opinionated positions, but they aren't acting as puppets for The Man.
So the question isn't whether individuals will be "more sneaky," "equally sneaky," or withdraw altogether from Wiki-Vandalism. The question is whether corporations, fearing publicity backlashes of the sort that WikiScanner has triggered, will attempt to extract themselves from the discussion completely. I wouldn't be surprised, for instance, if Sony executives consider blocking their employees' access to Wikipedia.
Who is liable?
That is a really excellent point, and one that has had me thinking for a couple days. What rights do users have while using company resources? Or to flip this around, what liabilities do we assign to an organization for the actions of users on their network?
From an organizational standpoint, it seems to me that there are two different types of user-based liabilities: legal and social. Legally, Sony employees may use network resources in such a way to put Sony at risk (e.g., housing of copyrighted materials). From a PR standpoint, employees may also put Sony at social risk when lambasting Toshiba on their corporate sponsored blogs.
The WikiScanner issue clearly falls into social liability, and so it would make sense that a company might ban Wikipedia in a knee-jerk reaction. Longer term, however, companies like Sony must decide if the business benefits derived from Wikipedia use (including the pages they author) outweighs the risks involved.
But Wikipedia doesn't stand alone. This debate pretends that the sites at which a company could be at social risk are some how statically defined. If a company can't get a hold on this behavior, at what point do they restrict Internet access entirely? The IT side of my brain quickly begins to roll on the ways in which Internet access could technically be restricted, while still allowing for a multiplicity of business uses. It is a complicated problem, and one with a substantial cost.
But let's turn this on its head. What if the user isn't the problem? What if the problem is the network? If user behavior is going to increasingly put business at social risk because it happens over IP addresses that are publicly identifiable, let just fix that. Concerned companies should probably start with their network topology, and begin routing employee traffic through unidentifiable IP addresses.
www.whatknows.com/blog