"A fraction too much friction
by Russell Brown
It took an American student to show us why Wikipedia should never be taken as gospel.
The appearance of the Wikipedia Scanner – a web-based tool that has disgorged an apparently endless list of self-interested interventions in the online encyclopedia by organisations as diverse as the CIA, Amnesty Inter‑national, Fox News and the voting-machine maker Diebold – has rightly generated global media interest.
But many reports missed the fact that it has always been possible to do what American student Virgil Griffith did with this new tool. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but anyone making a change anonymously will have their IP (internet protocol) address logged against the change they have made. An investigator with a modicum of technical skill can easily trace the IP address back to its source."
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