Misplaced Pages

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(Redirected from Misplaced Pages Scanner) Defunct database linking Misplaced Pages edits to institutions

WikiScanner
Screenshot of the website on 22 August 2007
Type of siteDatabase tool
Available inChinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish
OwnerVirgil Griffith
Created byVirgil Griffith
URLwikiscanner.virgil.gr
Virgil Griffith's
virgil.gr (Current)
CommercialNo
RegistrationNo
Launched13 August 2007; 17 years ago (2007-08-13)
Current statusOffline (at least since 2013, page moved)

WikiScanner (also known as Misplaced Pages Scanner) was a publicly searchable database that linked anonymous edits on Misplaced Pages to the organizations where those edits apparently originated. It did this by cross-referencing the edits with data on the owners of the associated block of IP addresses, though it did not investigate edits made under a username. It was created by Virgil Griffith and released on 13 August 2007.

In his "WikiScanner FAQ" Griffith stated his belief that WikiScanner could help make Misplaced Pages more reliable for controversial topics. He also indicated that he had never been employed by the Wikimedia Foundation and claimed his work on WikiScanner was "100% noncommercial". On 21 December 2012, a research group from Fondazione Bruno Kessler [it] released an open-source clone of WikiScanner called WikiWatchdog.

By April 2013, attempts to run "WikiScanner Classic" from wikiscanner.virgil.gr returned to the WikiScanner home page, which identified itself as "WIKIWATCHER.COM"; and invoking "WikiScanner2 Preview" led to a "failure to load the page due to timeout" error.

In 2007, Virgil Griffith said he had to take WikiScanner down, as it was costing him "several thousand USD per month". He added below this on his WikiScanner webpage that as a grad student at Caltech in 2008 he developed with the aid of several undergraduates "a suite of Misplaced Pages-related tools known collectively as "WikiWatcher" which included: WikiScanner2 (Daniel), Wikiganda (Rishi), Poor Man's Checkuser, and BeaverScope," which he launched at the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference that year. They used used "high-quality data" from Quova, and among them WikiWatcher "had some media successes, but when the summer was over there was no one to maintain the tools and they fell into disrepair".

Design

The tool's database contained 34 million entries on anonymous edits (those by users who were not logged in to Misplaced Pages) between 7 February 2002, and 4 August 2007. Griffith stated that the database was constructed by compiling the anonymous edits included amongst the monthly public database dumps of Misplaced Pages. He claimed to have connected the organizations to their IP address with the assistance of the IP2Location database, and through comparison had found "187,529 different organizations with at least one anonymous Misplaced Pages edit".

WikiScanner only worked on anonymous edits, which are made under an IP address, not edits by anyone logged in under a username. It could not distinguish between edits made by authorized users of an organization, unauthorized intruders, or users of public-access computers that may have been using an organization's network. In discussing edits made from computers in the Vatican, computer expert Kevin Curran was quoted by the BBC as saying that it was "difficult to determine if the person was an employee or if they had maliciously hacked into the Vatican system and were 'spoofing' the IP address".

The WikiScanner FAQ noted that edits could not be positively attributed to representatives of a company, only to a computer logged into a company's network. The FAQ went on to say there is no guarantee that an edit was made by an authorized user rather than an intruder. The likelihood of such intrusions depended upon an organizations' network security; organizations such as the Vatican Library have public access terminals or networks.

Media coverage and reaction

According to Wired, which first broke the story on 13 August 2007, most edits were "fairly innocuous". Wired asked users to submit "The most shameful Misplaced Pages spin jobs", which generated many news stories about organizations, such as the Al-Jazeera network, Fox News Channel, staffers of Democratic Senator Robert Byrd and the CIA, that had edited Misplaced Pages articles.

According to the BBC from 15 August, WikiScanner found that some editorial contributions to Misplaced Pages had originated from computers operated by the Diebold company, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as well as the Vatican. The Times reported that an IP address at the BBC had made edits to Misplaced Pages. The BBC's Head of Interactive News, Pete Clifton published a blog on August 16 acknowledging the earlier omission, but characterized the BBC's edits of Misplaced Pages in this manner: "Some of the examples are pretty unedifying, but for every dodgy one there are many, many more uncontroversial edits where people at the BBC have added information or changed a detail in good faith".

The Associated Press reported on 15 August, that computers owned by the Church of Scientology had been used to remove criticism from articles about Scientology on Misplaced Pages, including edits to the article Cult Awareness Network. The Associated Press admitted that edits to Misplaced Pages had been made anonymously from its own computers, though the news organization did not describe the content of the edits. In its story on WikiScanner, the New York Times too admitted that edits had been made from its own computers. Wired.com reported that the office of former Republican Senator Conrad Burns had also edited critical passages.

According to Maltastar.com from August 16, WikiScanner has shown edits by other large organizations, including Amnesty International, Apple Inc., ChevronTexaco, Coca-Cola, the British Conservative Party, Dell, EA Games, ExxonMobil, the FBI, The Guardian, Microsoft, MySpace, the National Rifle Association of America, Nestlé, News of the World, the New York Times, the Government of Portugal, the US Republican Party, Reuters, Sony, the United Nations, Walmart, and a dog breeding association. The Canadian television network CTV reported edits by other organizations including Disney and the Canadian government.

Reuters reported that CIA computers were used to edit an article regarding the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq, including editing a chart showing casualties. CIA computers also edited the article for former CIA chief William Colby. Reuters reported that an FBI computer edited an article on the United States prison at Guantanamo Bay. On 21 August, satirist Stephen Colbert who had long featured stories about Misplaced Pages and its "truthiness" on his program mocked WikiScanner creator Virgil Griffith's ambivalent stance on anonymity on Misplaced Pages, declaring it the "right" of corporations and governments to participate in the democratic process of deciding what is and is not true on Misplaced Pages.

On 24 August, headline reports in the Australian print and electronic media were made of anonymous edits to Misplaced Pages by staff in the Australian Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet in order to remove potentially damaging details from articles related to the Government. Information found using WikiScanner showed 126 anonymous edits from the department to articles on sometimes controversial issues and on government ministers. The department responded by saying that Prime Minister John Howard did not direct his staff to modify the articles, and later that day the head of the department said that the changes were not made by anyone in his department or the Prime Minister's office, but by another user with the same Internet service provider. Wikiscanner also identified Australian Department of Defence (DoD) employees as having made over 5,000 edits, prompting an unprecedented announcement from the DoD to block Defence staff from editing Misplaced Pages in case edits were interpreted as official comment.

On 26 August, The Boston Globe published an editorial about Misplaced Pages, described as a "democratic fountain of facts" and related WikiScanner technology, reporting as among those companies found to have edited Misplaced Pages were Pepsi, Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, in which specific case "In 2005, someone using a computer inside Royal Dutch Shell, the oil company, rewrote a benign description of the company, claiming it is 'run by a group of geriatrics who find it impossible to make timely decisions and have an aversion to highly-profitable ventures.'" The WikiScanner story was also covered by The Independent, which stated that many "censorial interventions" by editors with vested interests on a variety of articles in Misplaced Pages had been discovered.

On 18 December, Fortune magazine mentioned the use of WikiScanner in the 96th of its list of the "101 Dumbest Moments in Business", saying, "A Washington Post employee is found to have changed a reference to the owner of a rival paper from Philip Anschutz to Charles Manson, while someone at The New York Times added the word 'jerk' 12 times to the entry on George W. Bush".

During the period of 27 May to 4 June 2008, edits originating from an IP address belonging to Industry Canada were made to the Jim Prentice (Federal Minister of Industry) article on Misplaced Pages. The edits included the removal of references to new copyright legislation and the addition of two passages about Prentice's recent accomplishments as Minister of Industry.

Misplaced Pages reaction

Misplaced Pages co-founder Jimmy Wales spoke enthusiastically about WikiScanner, noting that "It brings an additional level of transparency to what's going on at Misplaced Pages" and that it was "fabulous and I strongly support it". The BBC quoted an unnamed Misplaced Pages spokesperson's praise for the tool in taking transparency "to another level" and preventing "an organisation or individuals from editing articles that they're really not supposed to". In responding to the edits from the Canadian Ministry of Industry, spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation Jay Walsh noted that neutrality of language and guarding against conflicts of interest are two of the central pillars of Misplaced Pages, adding that "The edits which should be trusted would come from people who don't possess a conflict of interest, in this case, it would be worthwhile saying that if someone is making edits from a computer within the government of Canada … if it was someone within that ministry, that would theoretically constitute a conflict of interest".

Wales speculated on a possible warning to anonymous editors: "When someone clicks on 'edit,' it would be interesting if we could say, 'Hi, thank you for editing. We see you're logged in from The New York Times. Keep in mind that we know that, and it's public information' … That might make them stop and think".

See also

References

  1. Biuso, Emily (9 December 2007). "Wikiscanning". The New York Times. Retrieved 9 December 2007. When Virgil Griffith, a 24-year-old hacker, heard reports that Congressional staff members had been caught altering Misplaced Pages for the benefit of their boss, he got to thinking of all the other kinds of spin occurring on the site.
  2. ^ Borland, John (14 August 2007). "See Who's Editing Misplaced Pages - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign". Wired. Retrieved 15 September 2012.
  3. ^ Griffith, Virgil. "WikiScanner FAQ". Archived from the original on August 30, 2007. Retrieved August 18, 2007.
  4. "WikiScanner2 Preview". Archived from the original on 22 September 2010.
    Accessibility of WikiScanner can be checked on the web page Archived April 8, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^ "Virgil Griffith's WikiScanner Page". Archived from the original on 14 March 2016.
  6. "Did Vatican alter Misplaced Pages info on Adams?". Belfast Telegraph. 16 August 2007. Retrieved 18 May 2009.
  7. "Rules for Readers in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana" (PDF). Vatican Library. September 15, 2006. Archived from the original (PDF) on September 27, 2007.
  8. Poulsen, Kevin (13 August 2007). "Vote On the Most Shameful Misplaced Pages Spin Jobs". Wired blogs. Retrieved 17 August 2007.
  9. ^ Fildes, Jonathan (15 August 2007). "Misplaced Pages 'shows CIA page edits'". BBC. Retrieved 16 August 2007.
  10. Blakely, Rhys. "Exposed: guess who has been polishing their Misplaced Pages entries?". The Times. Archived from the original on 17 May 2009. Retrieved 4 December 2011.
  11. Clifton, Pete (16 August 2007). "Misplaced Pages edits". BBC. Retrieved 16 August 2007.
  12. ^ "New online tool unmasks Misplaced Pages edits". Associated Press. August 15, 2007. Archived from the original on September 29, 2007. Retrieved August 16, 2007.
  13. ^ Hafner, Katie (19 August 2007). "Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Misplaced Pages Edits". The New York Times. Retrieved 19 August 2007.
  14. "Student's program sends PR chaos in Wiki-scandal". Maltastar.com. 16 August 2007. Archived from the original on 25 December 2007. Retrieved 19 August 2007.
  15. "Government computers linked to Misplaced Pages edits". CTV. 16 August 2007. Retrieved 20 August 2007.
  16. ^ "CIA and FBI computers used for Misplaced Pages edits". Reuters. 16 August 2007. Retrieved 27 January 2023.
  17. The Colbert Report. Comedy Central. August 21, 2007
  18. "PM's staff edited Misplaced Pages". Sydney Morning Herald. 24 August 2007. Retrieved 25 August 2007.
  19. Moses, Asher (24 August 2007). "Government caught Wiki-watching". The Age. Melbourne. Retrieved 25 August 2007.
  20. "PM 'not behind Misplaced Pages edits'". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 24 August 2007. Retrieved 25 August 2007.
  21. "PM's Dept denies making Misplaced Pages changes". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 24 August 2007. Retrieved 25 August 2007.
  22. "PM's staff edit Misplaced Pages entries". The Advertiser. 24 August 2007. Retrieved 24 August 2007.
  23. "Defence blocks staff's Misplaced Pages access". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 24 August 2007. Retrieved 25 August 2007.
  24. "Behind the e-curtain". The Boston Globe. 26 August 2007.
  25. Verkaik, Robert (18 August 2007). "Misplaced Pages and the art of censorship". The Independent. London. Archived from the original on 9 January 2009. Retrieved 17 September 2012.
  26. "101 Dumbest Moments in Business - 96. WikiScanner". Fortune. 17 December 2007. Retrieved 18 December 2007.
  27. Nowak, Peter (4 June 2008). "Government buffing Prentice's Misplaced Pages entry". Canada: CBC News. Retrieved 4 June 2008.
  28. Geist, Michael. "Prentice's Staff Scrubbing Copyright Controversy From Misplaced Pages Entry". michaelgeist.ca. Archived from the original on 19 April 2012. Retrieved 4 June 2008.
  29. Noyes, Katherine (15 August 2007). "New Tool Outs Would-Be Misplaced Pages Tricksters". TechNewsWorld. Retrieved 16 August 2007.
  30. Cheadle, Bruce (6 June 2008). "Copyright rewrite war rages on Prentice Misplaced Pages page". The Globe and Mail. Ottawa. The Canadian Press. Retrieved 9 October 2010.

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