Week 9

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that can be used and edited by anybody. It has been known to get edited by politicians, big corporations, and church groups that are deleting or adding words to help their images. For example, someone from Wal-Mart changed their image in 2005,by changing a line about how its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage. Another example is Diebold, in which a user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excluding an entire section critical of the company's machines.

Virgil Griffith a grad-student from Cal Tech created the WikiScanner, a search tool,that traces IP addresses of those who are making changes to Wikipedia. When changes are made to Wikipedia, it leaves fingerprints behind that offer hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the changes. In the case of Wal-Mart and Diebold, the IP addresses came from inside the corporations. Wikipedia is not a reliable source to use in papers because the information is not fact based. The WikiScanner may help Wikipedia become more reliable because people may be more cautious about changing information, when they know that it can be traced back to them.