Which organization is editing Wikipedia entries ?

A website like Wikipedia that offers every user the ability to edit most of the articles is definitely being manipulated by organizations, companies and individuals that try to push their agenda on this new battlefield. It is however not that easy to determine if an article has been altered by someone on behalf of an organization.

With that said it is important that the people know who edited an article and on which behalf this was done if an organization and not an individual did edit it. A constructed example would be if someone from the Democratic Party would be editing an article about the Republican Party or visa versa.

Wikiscanner is an ongoing effort to bring light into the darkness of Wikipedia article changes by offering a way to search more than 34 million Wikipedia edits from February 7th, 2002 to August 4th, 2007.

Several methods are offered to search the database:

• Search by Organization’s Name
• Search by Organization’s Location
• Search User submitted Organizations
• Search by IP Range
• Search Wikipedia page (disabled for now because of huge loads due to traffic spikes. Damn you Digg.

It is also possible to access so called Editor Picks which offer information about the Democratic and Republican Party, Diebold Inc., most common .mil and .gov domains, and CIA. There is more to explore and some finds are really interesting.

This is basically a IP lookup script that checks if a certain IP range that can be connected to an organization that did edit an Wikipedia article.

Wikipedia saves either the username if the user is logged in or the IP address if someone not logged in makes a change. All those information can be downloaded from Wikipedia and then used to analyze who - or better which organization - was editing the articles.