More evidence that you just can’t hide on the web.
A graduate student at Caltech has created the Wikipedia Scanner, a search tool that will identify edits to articles at the online encyclopedia that have been made by someone at a corporation, organization or government agency.
The idea is to “lay bare the ego-editing and anonymous flacking” being done by those whose purpose is far from the Wikipedia goal of information neutrality.
To get an idea of just what’s going on, Wired’s Threat Level blog is collecting examples for their wall of shame and allowing visitors to vote for the best of the west.
Some will use this as more ammunition to criticize the accuracy of Wikipedia and ban it for student use.
Instead this is a great example of just how information posted to the web can be made transparent.
And how we need to teach students to use all the tools available to validate the data they find.