 Screenshot of the website on August 22, 2007. | |
Type of site | Database tool |
|---|---|
| Available in | Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish |
| Owner | Virgil Griffith |
| Created by | Virgil Griffith |
| URL | wikiscanner.virgil.gr Virgil Griffith's current page |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | No |
| Launched | August 13, 2007 |
| Current status | Offline (at least since 2013) |
WikiScanner (also known as Wikipedia Scanner) was a publicly searchable database that linked anonymous edits on Wikipedia 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 August 13, 2007.[1][2]
In his "WikiScanner FAQ" Griffith stated his belief that WikiScanner could help make Wikipedia more reliable for controversial topics.[3] He also indicated that he had never been employed by the Wikimedia Foundation and claimed his work on WikiScanner was "100% noncommercial".[3] On December 21, 2012, a research group from Fondazione Bruno Kessler 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 PreviewNew!" led to a "failure to load the page due to timeout" error.[4]
In 2007, Virgil Griffith said he had to take WikiScanner down, as it was costing him "several thousand USD per month."[5] 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 Wikipedia-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."[5]
- ^ Biuso, Emily (December 9, 2007). "Wikiscanning". The New York Times. Retrieved December 9, 2007.
When Virgil Griffith, a 24-year-old hacker, heard reports that Congressional staff members had been caught altering Wikipedia for the benefit of their boss, he got to thinking of all the other kinds of spin occurring on the site.
- ^ Borland, John (August 14, 2007). "See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign". Wired. Retrieved September 15, 2012.
- ^ a b Griffith, Virgil. "WikiScanner FAQ". Archived from the original on August 30, 2007. Retrieved August 18, 2007.
- ^ "WikiScanner2 PreviewNew!". Archived from the original on September 22, 2010.
Accessibility of WikiScanner can be checked on the web page Archived April 8, 2012, at the Wayback Machine - ^ a b "Virgil Griffith's WikiScanner Page". Archived from the original on March 14, 2016.