WikiScanner tool creates "minor public relations disasters" for scores of organizations
Early on August 14, Wired News broke the story of WikiScanner, an online tool created by hacker Virgil Griffith that facilitates connecting the IP addresses of anonymous Wikipedia edits to the associated organizations. Griffith's tool combines the English Wikipedia database (current through August 4) with information from ip2location, which associates IP addresses with the specific organizations that control them. The initial Wired story described a few instances of dubious editing: edits from Diebold include the removal of criticism from the Diebold article, and edits from Wal-Mart include attempts to "burnish the company's image".
A companion post to Wired's Threat Level blog by editor Kevin Poulsen, "Vote On the Most Shameful Wikipedia Spin Jobs", invited readers to use WikiScanner to find new examples, with a reddit-powered voting system for picking out the most egregious ones. Hundreds of examples have been submitted, many of which violate Wikipedia's conflict of interest guideline. Several of the top-rated examples, including edits attributed to Diebold, the Church of Scientology, and the National Rifle Association, have received over 1000 votes, and new submissions continue to accumulate.