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In Wikipedia we trust? DHS Fellow Virgil Griffith taking Wikipedia updaters to task

(Nov. 5, 2007)

For the average researcher, Wikipedia has become an all too frequent reference popping up as the gospel truth. For those who know better, like DHS Fellow Virgil Griffith, Wikipedia is a free-for-all where those updating Wikipedia entries can have less than credible intent.

The soft drink company attempting to downplay the negative effects of its product, a multi-national oil company seeking to downplay the environmental effects of an oil spill, the politician seeking to improve his or her representation in the online world – All are documented examples where anonymity has shielded the identity of the updater and his or her intent behind the entry.

A 2007 DHS Fellow and computation and neural systems Ph.D. student at the California Institute of Technology, Griffith has targeted the anonymous editing of Wikipedia entries with only an IP left behind as accessories to the crime.

In pursuit of the truth (or the bad guys), Griffith’s creation, “WikiScanner,” offers a searchable database that connects millions of Wikipedia edits to the organizations from which those edits originated.

“I came up with the idea when I heard about Congressmen getting caught for white-washing their wikipedia pages,” says Griffith, whose work has been cited by Wired.com, the BBC News, NPR and the New York Times, among others.

“Every time I hear about a new security vulnerability, I think about whether it could be done on a massive scale and indexed,” says Griffith.

Some notable examples include a 2005 incident where a user deleted 15 paragraphs from an entry describing the security benefits of e-voting machine vendor Diebold. Evidence also exists of a certain supermarket conglomerate (think Southern U.S.) editing criticism voiced against the organization on a community activist entry. Governmental organizations are not immune, guilty of changing their entries or those that voice criticism against them.

Griffith is not opposed to the low barriers to adding content to Wikipedia, recognizing this need to sustain its growth. Rather, he urges the use of back-end analyses, such as his WikiScanner, to counteract disinformation.

“Overall--especially for non-controversial topics--Wikipedia already works,” says Griffith. “For controversial topics, Wikipedia can be made more reliable through techniques like this one.”

Griffith started this project in August 2007. Learn more about WikiScanner and Virgil at: http://virgil.gr.