I noticed that our RSS feeds picked up this article by our friend Ludwig from Ohmy News, the person who finally got to the crux of the SlimVirgin scandal:

http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/ar...?at_code=428814

One important part of his report, that every single other news report (there's 100s of them) has missed is this:



Now, why would Wikipedia want to hire Virgil Griffith? Everything that we are seeing about the Wiki Scanner is that it seriously HARMS Wikipedia's integrity. So why would Wikipedia hire him?

Furthermore, why would all of the news services miss this important fact? Is it perhaps false?

As Daniel Brandt noted, Virgil Griffith was a hobbyist, who couldn't possibly have had enough money to fund people using his scanner en masse without some funding from somewhere. Sure, he could create it, but even still its a big venture to do just for fun. But the amount of traffic he is getting would be costing him bucketloads. So who is funding him?

Another related interesting issue is that Wikipedia has barely said a thing about it. It isn't in talk pages, has 3 "ho hum" comments on their mailing list, and is basically forgotten about. Why would they forget about this? The SlimVirgin scandal generated thousands of comments on-wiki and hundreds of comments on the mailing list (yet they still tried to pretend it didn't exist). Why wouldn't they even mention it?

Wikipedia has an article on Virgil Griffith, that existed before he created the Wikipedia Scanner. It is located here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_Griffith

Can anyone see the part about him creating the Wikipedia Scanner? It is there, but it is very much hidden, that you'd miss if you weren't searching for it.



Not best known for Wikipedia Scanner, but best known for a lawsuit.

And then they have an article (for the moment) on the Wikipedia Scanner too. But it is tiny:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Scanner

Nowhere does it state that the Wikipedia Scanner was funded by Jimbo Wales.

Indeed, another issue of this is that it is now proven beyond any doubt whatsoever that CIA has edited Wikipedia, and furthermore that they did so with a definite agenda. "To save American lives", Ludwig quoted them as saying. Yet throughout Wikipedia and indeed even on Wikipedia Review a number of people were insisting that it was ludicruous to suggest that they were editing Wikipedia. Yet now we have absolute proof. So why aren't a bunch of people saying "Oh yeah sorry, I guess they were all along. Oops."

This revelation by perhaps the smartest journalist going around, Ludwig, has really got straight to the crux of the matter, and has also exposed the fact that most of the media has been played and manipulated with regards to this story.

But it raises another question: Why would Wikipedia want to adopt this risky strategy? The scanner puts them in a bad light. Whilst it then introduces plausible deniability, if the media were able to uncover that Wikipedia themselves had paid for the scanner's production, then it destroys all of their efforts.

The only thing now is to get Ludwig's story out there for everyone else to see.

Hmm, it certainly feels like a smoke-screen, with all of this stuff out in the open....

I wonder....Maybe they needed a diversion to get the public's mind off of the SV stuff, since that was was potentially more dangerous, so they came up with this idea and the "spin" is that "yeah, but we caught all of that and corrected it! Ain't Wikipedia great!!"

The problem with this logic is that anybody who's reasonably logical and wants to infiltrate something to control various aspects of the way the organization like this works is sure not going to be editing using anonymous IPs. They're going to infiltrate as named users (the IP is hidden, so only checkusers know who these people are....and probably everybody already knows anyway....) who then get promoted as admins etc....

So really, the anon. IPs doing this kind of stuff really does seem to be diversion. The good stuff is going to be when we can figure out which admins have what COI issues....

It does look like a diversion. But only Ludwig has picked this up. All the other media outlets, including Wired, has played along with it, thinking that this is the scandal in itself.

Good old Ludwig. Its a pity that he can barely speak English (someone had to translate the page for him) or else we'd have him on the forums.

Indeed people in CIA buildings have edited wikipedia. People in every virtually every workplace and institution in the the English speaking world have edited WP. The IP addresses from the scanner show up a couple of 1000 edits - which isn't very significant, and these seem to be minor, some are even vandalism. I remain fairly certain that they have made no significant changes to WP content, and certainly no regular registered editors match the bill. If we have evidence that a significant piece of an article has been impacted by the agency, I'll change my mind. But having seen endless edits criticising and exposing the CIA in great detail, which remain to this day, and no suspicious edits subverting content in their favour - on literally 100s of candidate pages - it remains to be seen whether the impact is noteworthy or not.

I know this is not what people want to read. And our goals would be greatly enhanced if we could uncover a ring of content subversion from proven agents of influence. But it just isn't there - yet at any rate.

However, the broader picture looks bleaker for Der Jimbo thanks to these latest "exposes". So some celebration is in order.

There is still no evidence that the CIA edited Wikipedia as part of an operation, only that some employees (who could easily be admin staff, receptionists, interns...) had a bit of a play around.

What we really need is Virgil's tool applied to a checkuser dump.



Jinx!

If you look at Ludwig's article, he has compared 293 edits by CIA, and found a definite agenda, and furthermore has interviewed the CIA who has stated that they did this with a definite agenda.

Isn't that good enough?

I'm not sure what you expect to find from CIA employees though - massively long left wing screeds against Oliver North?

You can reasonably expect edits from CIA computers to represent offical CIA viewpoints, as you can reasonably expect their low level (and realisitcally that's who we're talking about) staff to share the CIA's ethos.

Anyway, back on to the main topic there. Does anyone have any more thoughts as to why Wikipedia hired Virgil Griffith? And is it relevant that no other media outlets seem to have picked this up? Or that Wikipedia aren't even really noticing the whole Wiki Scanner thing?

Well, in one sense you would expect someone developing this type of tool to have a strong interest in Wikis and some genuine technical talent, both of which you would also expect from someone hired to do this Job, so you could ask Guy/Poetlister about the relevance of Bayes' Theorem here.

But I do think that this does seem a little bit fishy. I can't help you with what Wikipedia is doing though, it's a mystrey to me.

Wow. Interesting developments.

1) An anon IP who had never previously edited before today, removed all references of the Wiki Scanner from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=151814201

2) This was then backed up by Vishal-WMF:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=151814321
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=151814656

3) Casey Abell insisted that "Ohmy News is not a reliable source":

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=151817649

4) Another Anon IP, who had only ever edited Wikipedia once before, a month earlier, also tried to remove the information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=151808289

Now if only the scanner wasn't down, we could find out who these IP addresses are...

The scanner's been all over the news. It'd cost them tons of money to keep it going. But wait, his wikipedia article claims the foundation hired him to create the scanner. They shoulda just integrated it into their software.

So someone who is a university student and doesn't have a job is supposed to be able to afford to keep it going without any external funding? Give me a break.

Who is funding him if not Wikipedia? Who else could gain from it being funded?

Wikitruth?

If they just integrated it into their software as an extention, then you know it's possible they wouldn't get all this news coverage. As an external sort of thing now it's like some vigilante exposes this great conspiracy. Oh and Jayjg's already oversighted all of SlimVirgin's IP edits.

Well that's it. It isn't really giving an awful lot of new information. It just makes things a lot easier to use.

If Wikipedia did this themselves, obviously as part of their own network, then people would use it and go "ho hum" but then after a while there'd be shocks and horrors, but again "and I wonder about what all of the people who log in are doing". But as an external thing, it has a different effect, it makes people think that this is all that's wrong with Wikipedia.

It's kind of like Wikipedia pretending that vandalism is their main criticism, when controlled articles and truth-changing are far more serious.

If Wikimedia hired him to do this, I'd think they would host it on their machines. The only source for this seems to be Dr. Ludwig, and I think Dr. Ludwig is a little mixed up.

No, I don't buy it. I think it was in the first wired story that Jimbo Wales "refuses to comment" until he learns more about Wikipedia Scanner.

Of course, now that Jimbo has stuck his finger in the wind, maybe he will put Griffith on the payroll.

I don't think this received any funding to be made. It actually sounds like spin to make Wikipedia look better to suggest this, but hopefully De Braeckeleer just got confused, and assumed that they hired Griffith as a response to his article.

Youre kidding, right? Looking up IP addresses is childs play. Google it. The wikiscanner has no better information than any other IP lookup tool.

Those two addresses were from the APIC Asian Pacific Internet C---(something) in Milton Australia - and then the 2nd IP on that page was Rogers telecom in Toronto Canada. Nothing earth shattering. Just like most IP addresses, they were an ISP indicator, and even necessarily a fixed IP.


Server space is cheap if you don't get much traffic, which it would now be getting. Maybe his university is hosting it presently. It sounds logical. It might even be a school project. Universities don't usually care about such things, if there's a good reason for them. Creating the thing only would have cost him time. And if Wikipedia "hired" him, I wonder if that was the usual co-opting hire, or if they are actually paying him. The latter would be refreshing. I doubt that they paid him anything for it. Probably just gratefully accepted it, and assumed he'd be honored to give it to them.

Well that's it. It isn't really giving an awful lot of new information. It just makes things a lot easier to use.

The real usage for Wikipedia is checkuser dump analysis, which means (hello!) more checkuser abuse. They've been pretty careful about allowing checkuser privilige to people, and now they are just going to shoot out the names of who and what did what. So this might unprotect the entire checkuser concept. Unless what they say is true, and they really don't retain IP information after 3 months, which I never believed.

Yes, thats the spin, and the media is buying it, unfortunately.

Woah - the article has been vanished!!!!

Shit and it hasn't been cached by Google either.

Who made it disappear?

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&ned=...F-8&sa=N&tab=nw

No worries its back up again.

"Rogers telecom in Toronto Canada" - Jayjg uses Roger's Telecom and lives in Toronto.

So that could be Jayjg? Hmm. So Jayjg isn't on holiday?

It's certainly conclusive - I doubt more than 1 million people meet that description.

So are we suggesting that the 2 IP addresses (other than the WMF employee), one was Jayjg - who was the other one? Neither of them had made edits to Wikipedia before. Who do we know in Australia with a vested interest in suppressing the truth about this kind of issue?

Ambi?

I can't think of anyone else who would care.

Actually, could it be Grace Note? Would Grace Note care? He's in Australia. But if it was him, surely it'd have other edits.

The ip contribs obviously only show up contribs that aren't made under a username. So whoever it was could have just logged out of their user account then made those edits because they didn't want the edits to be linked to their account.

Virgil Griffith says:

Above that he gives some numbers:

I didn't know you could extract anonymous edits for a 5.5-year period from a Wikipedia dump that is released about once a month. I'm not saying he's wrong, I'm just saying that I didn't know that this was possible. I know almost nothing about Wikipedia dumps.

You can look at the IP database he's using here. It appears that $349/year is what he has to pay to lease this database for use on one server.

He claims that all he wanted from this project was to increase his PageRank for the term "virgil" in his domain name. He seems to be too cute by about half on his website, so I'm not sure I buy his story that he got no help for this project.

TEN MINUTES LATER: In another thread, Anthony says it's easy to get this info from Wikipedia.

If you have a look at all the news articles, what we are really getting is ooo look at all these naughty people attacking Wikipedia who should know better---poor old Wikipedia etc etc etc....It seems to me this is (i) a publicity drive for Wikipedia and (ii) a possible attempt, as been said here to divert attention from the SlimVirgin and Hasbara stories.

Too bad we don't have the Hasbara IPs.

Actually we have some of Jays and SlimVirgin's not that they are of any particular use in that they can't be tied to any particular organization.

I think that the openly published Hasbara call to "correct" Wikipedia was somewhat of a red herring since there has been a clique favoured by Jimbo Wales for going on 5 or more years (starting with Danny Wool, former chief educator at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, NY, now no. 2 at Wikipedia) that has used Wikipedia to attempt to paint a view of history obviously biased towards an Israeli point of view as well as allowing articles on people who have been critical of Israel to be attacked by editors coming from Frontpagemag and similar sites. Of course, the problem for Wales is if his website starts to be seen as anti-Israel in any way then he could start getting a lot of flak from certain groups in the U.S. as well as the wider U.S. public and consequently taint his name and damage his ability to raise donations for Wikipedia.

Given a choice, its better to appear pro-Israel than anti-Israel. Of course, its better to avoid the whole thing entirely. Why is it even relevant? Pre-Grace Note, Wikipedia Review didn't even discuss Jews. I blame Grace Note for the whole thing.

I notice that Wired has put the "correction" in their article itself, thus killing the story.

How much did Wikipedia pay Wired to lie like that? It has totally destroyed the whole point of this investigation, and moved it around the other way.

Yep, http://download.wikimedia.org/

Specifically, http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20070...-history.xml.gz is from August 4.

Eh, I wasn't talking about WR I was talking about WP.

From the I Dont Know What It Means Department:

RomanPoet is Virgil's hacker moniker. It is also a WP user. Durova has recently been attempting to contact this user.

That's exactly right. The world's biggest spinning operation is not those "IP number" edits which are tracked by Griffith's project; it is actually the established users of Wikipedia, whose IP addresses are not available for inspection. The Griffith project is interesting, but it's a sideshow, and possibly an intentional distraction. Ironically, it is the "anonymous" changes which can be attributed, and the edits made by logged-in users that are actually anonymous.

Virgil's going to learn a lot about Wikipedia!

Sure she does. She's been talking about it on listserver. She wants to get ahold of his software and use it for "investigations".

My take on this is that she wants to input IP data into the machine from all logged-in user inputs, and create the largest abuse of checkuser in human history. And since she can claim to be doing it in the interest of the Foundation, she'll be spot-clean.

Why would it be an abuse? She could find out who all of the logged in users are that are vandalising accounts.

In theory, its a wonderful idea.

And then selectively prosecute based upon her own biases.

Exactly. This woman doesn't even have checkuser status, and she's going to ask to have all the data that you would normally need CU status to analyze. Then she'd get the lifelong history of the data in her hands. All logged in user anonymity would be finished with at that moment.

And Durova is well known for prosecuting people with no information at all. So with IP information in her hot little hands, she'd have even more licence to abuse. IP information is really nothing, after all. In many cases, it tells you that the person uses Bellsouth, or T-mobile, or whatever. Dynamic IPs aren't good indicators of even where the person is located. I've used some hotspots which reported me as logging in to a state I'd never visited. So basically, IP info is only good a percentage of the time.

Still, with this study done, she'd have more credibility. Since she already abuses (and conflates) the little credibility she currently has, that's not a good thing.

Okay maybe Durova is evil, not trustworthy etc. Maybe she is the wrong person to have that information.

However, if you had the right person with that information, think about what it could achieve.

Wiki Scanner has exposed the tip of the iceberg, the IP vandalism. Imagine if instead of just anon IPs, it had every editor, logged in or not, and was able to determine bias for all of them. It could determine whether people like SlimVirgin had abused their position. It could determine which users were secretly CIA agents. It could determine lots of things.

Indeed, IP information is not private (I think we've already established this), so why couldn't this information be all distributed publicly? What if, rather than Durova keeping it to herself (which some would argue is wrong), it was all released publicly, for public scrutiny like how Wired magazine let people submit worst Wikipedia spin jobs, but for all users, not just IPs.

I think that that would be of incredible benefit to our cause.

The biggest concern that I would have is that logged in users tend to have something more of an identity, and hence by making their IP addresses and all edits public, it could attach it to a real life personality. This would be fine in making people accountable, and indeed it would make people accountable. But in some cases it could in effect release real life information that could lead to them being stalked and such in real life.

But would it/could it lead to stalking and other related crimes? That would be my greatest concern.