The Wikipedia Scanner is a tool designed by Virgil Griffith to expose companies and organizations manipulating Wikipedia entries for their own gain.

If you’ve ever browsed through Wikipedia, you might have noticed that editing an article is as simple as clicking on the "edit this page" button, making your edits, and hitting "save." This simplicity is one of the platform’s greatest strengths, but it also poses a risk: Anyone, including anonymous users, can make changes.

There are numerous stories about individuals or organizations manipulating Wikipedia pages, whether maliciously or as part of a prank. However, restricting users from making quick edits would limit one of Wikipedia’s most valued features, which has played a significant role in its widespread success.

Wikipedia employs several tools to address malicious edits. The platform provides detailed guides on what makes a good entry and how to correct erroneous ones. Many Wikipedians — dedicated users who frequently edit articles — serve as vigilant overseers, fixing harmful edits. Wikipedia also keeps a history of changes, allowing articles to be reverted to their prior versions. Additional features, such as locking pages, blocking users, and flagging violating content, are available to keep the site’s quality intact.

Even with all the available tools, Wikipedians can't be everywhere. With over 1.9 million articles in English alone, the potential for misuse is vast, especially by anonymous users [source: Wikimedia]. This is where the WikiScanner comes in, a free software released in August 2007 by Virgil Griffith, a graduate student in computation and neural systems at the California Institute of Technology and a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute.

Whenever an anonymous user without an account edits a Wikipedia page, the site logs the user's IP address, a unique number string that identifies any device connected to the internet. The WikiScanner uses these logs to track the IP addresses of anonymous Wikipedia contributors. By cross-referencing these addresses with a database of companies that own them, the tool can reveal the identity of the editor, or at least the organization behind the user's internet connection.

The results have been staggering — tens of millions of anonymous edits carried out by over 180,000 organizations, many of which clearly violated Wikipedia’s policies. Some of the notable offenders include the FBI, CIA, the UK's Labour Party, the Vatican, Wal-Mart, the Republican Party, the Church of Scientology, Dell, Microsoft, Apple, and the United Nations.

This article takes a deeper look at how the WikiScanner functions, explores some of the more controversial or outright strange instances of anonymous editing, and examines the reactions to the tool. We'll also show you how you can use the WikiScanner to uncover what certain organizations or corporations are doing on Wikipedia.

Creating the Wikipedia Scanner

When developing the WikiScanner, Virgil Griffith leveraged one of Wikipedia’s core features — its comprehensive records and archives. To see an example of these records, simply click the 'history' tab at the top of any Wikipedia article. There, you can view the usernames of registered editors, the IP addresses of anonymous editors, and notes on the changes made. You can also compare different article versions or even leave a message for an editor, including anonymous ones.

Wikipedia offers the option to download the entire encyclopedia, including every article and the history of all edits made. Griffith downloaded the full archive and extracted all anonymous edits along with their associated IP addresses. This yielded a staggering 34,417,493 anonymous edits made between February 7, 2002, and August 4, 2007, from 2,668,095 different IP addresses [source: Griffith].

Several services, some accessible to the public, enable the tracing of IP addresses back to the organizations, corporations, and government agencies that own them. Using software from IP2Location, a company that offers programs for matching IP addresses with their owners, Griffith discovered that 187,529 organizations had made anonymous edits to Wikipedia entries [source: Griffith].

That’s essentially the whole process. While it might seem like a simple concept, no one had fully examined anonymous edits on Wikipedia or tried to uncover the identities behind them before Virgil Griffith. Now available through Griffith’s website, the WikiScanner lets users search for specific organizations, individual IP addresses, ranges of IP addresses, or particular Wikipedia entries. After the initial release, Griffith temporarily disabled some features due to overwhelming traffic but later restored them, boasting enough bandwidth 'to handle the web traffic of a small country' [source: Griffith].

Various websites, including "Wired," have created blogs or forums where users can share their favorite WikiScanner discoveries. On Griffith's site, there's a collection of "Editor's Picks" that highlights edits made by notable organizations, organized into categories like government, education, policy, corporate, and media. Griffith also offers other fascinating lists, such as the number of anonymous edits originating from .gov addresses. NASA leads the pack with 6,846 edits [source: Griffith]. The Department of Defense Network Information Center, which owns the army.mil domain, tops the .mil addresses with 43,823 edits [source: Griffith].

What kind of results did the WikiScanner uncover? Keep reading to find out.

Exposed by the Wikipedia Scanner

With over 34 million anonymous edits made by 187,529 organizations, it will take a long time for anyone to sift through the data and uncover all the potentially controversial edits flagged by the WikiScanner. Anonymous editing will continue as long as it remains a part of Wikipedia’s structure. However, many organizations have already been exposed by the WikiScanner. In this section, we’ll explore the findings by Griffith and other users.

Not all anonymous editing on Wikipedia is intended to cause harm. Some users prefer not to register for the site or wish to fix small issues, like a grammatical mistake, without logging in. Many of the edits discovered by the WikiScanner were harmless. However, some anonymous changes seem suspicious or crafted to benefit a specific organization. Others appear to turn articles into promotional content or press releases. (Wikipedia has a tag to mark articles that resemble advertisements for a company or product.)

Diebold Election Systems attracted significant attention due to anonymous edits linked to its network. The company, which manufactures electronic voting machines, had already been embroiled in controversy over the reliability of its machines and the involvement of its CEO in George Bush's political campaigns. The WikiScanner revealed that in November 2005, a user from a Diebold-associated IP address deleted 15 paragraphs discussing these controversies. Shortly afterward, another user restored the deleted sections and issued a warning to the anonymous editor on their "talk page."

A user identified with a Democratic party IP address edited articles about conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, calling him "idiotic," "racist," and a "bigot" [source: Wikipedia]. The editor also described most of Limbaugh's audience as "legally retarded," criticized his views as "ridiculous," and linked the word "ridiculous" to Wikipedia's article on Conservatism [source: Wikipedia]. Other users from Democratic Party computers made minor edits to articles about seemingly harmless topics, like British tennis player Tim Henman, the burrito chain Baja Fresh, and green roofs.

An anonymous editor at the National Rifle Association made changes to a Wikipedia page about conspiracy theories surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. The user modified a paragraph to suggest a link between the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein and the attacks [source: Griffith]. The same organization also twice edited the Wikipedia entry for the liger, a hybrid of a male lion and a female tiger [source: Griffith].

In addition to various disputes between political adversaries, the WikiScanner exposed examples of companies editing Wikipedia pages about their rivals. Apple made changes to Microsoft-related pages, and someone from Microsoft edited articles about Apple. The British newspaper "The Guardian" even edited an entry for its competitor, "The Times."

Many anonymous Wikipedia edits are amusing, especially considering their origins. A CIA user contributed a lengthy piece about lightsaber combat. An individual from DARPA, the Department of Defense's advanced research agency, made edits to articles about "The Real World: Denver," actor Shia LaBeouf, and hockey player Bill Guerin. None of these edits seemed malicious or violated Wikipedia's guidelines.

Consequences of the Wikipedia Scanner

On his personal website, Griffith explains that the idea for the WikiScanner came about after learning that some Congressmen were whitewashing their own Wikipedia pages, removing negative content or replacing it with more positive terms [source: Griffith]. For instance, a politician described as "controversial" or "temperamental" might be reworded as "dynamic."

In addition to his other motivations for creating the WikiScanner, Griffith stated that he wanted to "create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike" and "to see what 'interesting organizations' (whom I remain neutral towards) are up to" [source: Griffith]. He also humorously mentions his desire "to improve virgil.gr's Google pagerank [sic] for the query 'virgil.'"

The launch of the WikiScanner led to a wave of newspaper coverage and inspired amateur detectives worldwide to investigate suspicious edits. Griffith seems to have succeeded in one of his objectives, as many companies now find themselves scrutinized for the actions of individuals with access to their networks.

When the WikiScanner links an edit to a company's IP address, it doesn't necessarily indicate that an employee made the changes or that the company authorized them. The tool can't pinpoint the individual responsible—only the IP address and its associated company. However, Griffith pointed out that if the edit occurred during working hours, the person likely belonged to the company or had temporary access to its network [source: Griffith].

A significant number of anonymous edits violate Wikipedia's guidelines, particularly its conflict of interest (COI) rule. Although editors with potential COIs are not barred from making edits, they are encouraged to act with caution [source: Wikipedia]. Some organizations appear to be editing articles to serve their own interests, possibly breaching Wikipedia's rules in the process.

One of the core tenets of Wikipedia is the commitment to a neutral point of view (NPOV), which Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales describes as "absolute and non-negotiable" [source: Wikimedia]. Many of the contentious edits exposed by the WikiScanner violate this NPOV principle.

Griffith expressed that while he supports the idea of open platforms like Wikipedia allowing anonymous editing, tools like WikiScanner could be valuable in addressing malicious edits [source: Griffith]. It could help preserve the integrity of controversial pages and monitor instances of vandalism. Additionally, it may encourage users to be more cautious with anonymous edits, possibly opting to make them from home or public computers.

Virgil Griffith mentioned that he has not had direct communication with the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia. However, he noted that the Foundation's statements in the media appeared supportive. A Wikipedia spokesperson shared with BBC News that the company "really [values] transparency, and the scanner really takes this to another level" [source: BBC News]. The spokesperson also stated that in the future, the WikiScanner could help prevent individuals with conflicts of interest from editing articles [source: BBC News].

In a conversation with the "Times Online," Griffith mentioned that his next venture might involve exploring the personal information people share on social networking platforms [source: Times Online].