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Did you create your own Wikipedia entry? Get a friend to edit it!

There was a time when a popular fantasy claimed that Wikipedia was "more accurate than the Encyclopaedia Britannica" - and perhaps, just perhaps, this is occasionally true. But the opportunity to publish self-serving stuff has tempted too many careless spin doctors, who didn't cover their tracks.

As CBS remarked:

As the Web encyclopedia that anyone can edit, Wikipedia encourages participants to adopt online user names, but it also lets contributors be identified simply by their computers' numeric Internet addresses.

Often that does not provide much of a cloak, such as when PCs in congressional offices were discovered to have been involved in Wikipedia entries trashing political rivals.

I myself felt obliged to edit my own Wiki entry at one point, so I sort of sympathise. But Virgil Griffith and his WikiScanner caused quite a bit of excitement by showing that some of the entries in the volunteer-encyclopaedia can be directly traced to the PCs used to create them.

Guess what: if you have a publicly-editable web site, the public will edit it! - duh. But it seems that in future, if we plan skulduggery, we'd be well advised to go to a public Internet cafe before logging on...

Meanwhile, Virgil himself is being breathtakingly honest about his motives for setting up WikiScanner: "I'm on a quest to become the #1 hit on google for query 'virgil', I ask that on your website you put a link to virgil.gr with the anchor 'virgil' as described above," he says.

He's number seven right now, with Google describing him:

VIRGIL.GRiffith. Mad Scientist. Disruptive Technologist. I work in various labs at Indiana University. I may even get a degree someday. ...

But, he says, he isn't just out for his 15 minutes of Warhol.

"I think one of the core messages of the cypherpunk movement is that anonymous speech is important and should be preserved," he writes on his FAQ. "So no, I do not believe something like WikiScanner, which identifies people, is necessary. Overall - especially for non-controversial topics - Wikipedia already works. For controversial topics, Wikipedia can be made more reliable through techniques like this one."

And Wikipedia even has an entry about Virgil

Will the discovery of WikiScan mean that in future, nefarious editors will use remote machines? As Griffith says, probably not. After all these years since fingerprinting was developed, people still fail to use gloves when committing burglaries, he notes...

Photo courtesy Henry Strickland.