On Aug. 14, Wired reported that Griffith had completed a new software utility known as the "Wikipedia Scanner". The software is capable of tracking millions of Wikipedia article edits back to their originating...

Article: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/searc...&at_code=428814

Ludwig is now writing his 2nd ever piece about Wikipedia.

Before long he'll be regarded as a Wikipedia critic!

Actually, I think that Ludwig has demonstrated that he is really capable of getting to the crux of the matter, and his article is better than the others that are out there.

1) He noted that Virgil Griffith was hired by Wikipedia (most people have implied or assumed that he was working against Wikipedia)
2) He noted that CIA didn't have just 1 edit, they had MANY
3) He noted CIA's response to these accusations
4) He traced the importance and relevance of the CIA's altering of truth

Perhaps now people who were saying "The CIA aren't interested in Wikipedia" can shut up now. Not only are they editing, but at least on a few occasions they've edited from CIA's own building, while not logged in. This would probably represent less than 1% of their total edits, as no doubt they also have created accounts, and edit from other buildings not officially attached to the CIA.

But even with this small sample, we can prove that the CIA is in Wikipedia.

Not a conspiracy theory anymore. Now its a proven fact.

Thanks for spotting this, Blissyu2. It is interesting that Wikipedia hired this guy. I've been wondering about a couple of things, and this explains them. One thing I found curious is that Jimbo implied when the SlimVirgin story came out that the Foundation was on top of the situation and watching it closely. He had nothing further to say. The other thing I found curious is that this hacker guy must have done a dump of the entire Wikipedia history record for anon edits, and then organized them by IP blocks, and did reverse lookups on the .gov domains and some corporate domains. While that was a possibility in my mind, it seems rather ambitious for a hobbyist doing it for fun. It also seems he'd need a fair amount of bandwidth and a few dedicated servers if he intended to maintain the tool and keep it humming at an acceptable level.

If he was hired by Wikimedia Foundation and had data-access support on Wikipedia for the project, that explains it. This project was bigger than my plagiarism project (which required 29,000 Scroogle searches on some 12,000 Wikipedia articles), and that took several hours a day for six weeks. An entire history list of anon edits for (I presume) almost all articles, is a big deal just to get the info extracted. It's not something a hobbyist would do for his own amusement — too much work!

Isn't it interesting that the Foundation decided to get in front of the SlimVirgin story by doing this? It rather increases my suspicion that the Real Story is with some of the admins (like Jayjg) that have screen names, and Jimbo would rather see the current anon IP story out there than the Real Story. The problem with SlimVirgin is that it pointed a big fat finger at the possibilities of infiltration that come with anonymous admins, and Jimbo doesn't need that.

However, the distinction between anons and anonymous admins is one that might get lost on the general public. I know I've had a hard time explaining to people like John Seigenthaler that an anonymous admin is even more anonymous than some vandal like Brian Chase. This latest CIA story is not going to help Wikipedia in the long run. It will help Jimbo spin the media in interviews, because he can dwell on the CIA and IP addresses instead of on anonymous admins. But it's probably still a net negative for Wikipedia.

The other thing is that the CIA is rather stupid to be using the same Class C block for their headquarters Internet access. They were using this same block more than five years ago! If you don't believe me, then check out this page I wrote back in 2002. I had been watching the CIA surf around NameBase for several years even before I wrote that page. The IP addresses shown there are still used today, and the several new ones they are using are on the same Class C block!

According to Ludwig, the CIA are denying that the edits come from them, or suggesting that perhaps it might be someone else. Is it possible that those edits aren't CIA? That that is a red herring? It doesn't add up in my mind, but anyway perhaps it is.

Ludwig is the only person that I have seen that has pointed out that he was hired by Wikipedia. Indeed, I am not 100% sure if his information is correct.

If he was hired by Wikipedia, then was this a deliberate effort to turn attention away from SlimVirgin? It is a rather risky strategy, if it is. This scandal still hurts Wikipedia, and indeed is brought to public media attention much more than SlimVirgin was. And indeed, if it is brought to light that he was indeed hired by Wikipedia, then people like Fox News will jump on it, and try to divert attention away from them editing their own articles and on to Wikipedia's screen name people.

Fox News, so you know, is one of the groups that was caught out by this scanner, and I am sure that they would be very keen to clear their name, or at least to put it in to perspective.

If Dr. De Braeckeleer is correct in saying that Wikipedia hired Griffith to develop the Wikipedia Scanner, then this could well turn out to be WP's version of the Maginot Line. That is not to say the scanner is technically flawed (any more than the Maginot Line was), but rather that it will nonetheless fail to bring about the great boon expected of it. It is obvious that results gotten from the scanner have already generated a great deal of negative publicity, despite the fact it may have been especially designed to help protect the "purity of the wiki". I believe that there is no one here on WR that was unaware that there is "POV pushing" going on on the part of certain interested individuals and groups, but the scanner is revealing that it is very pervasive indeed. It very well may be more than the cabalistas and the "RC patrollers" can ever handle. And it does not help WP that these stories about the scanner results fit very neatly with existing storylines concerning the inaccuracy and unreliability of WP.

Now if we could just get the media to pay attention to the drama and dysfunction behind the inaccuracy and unreliability. I have little doubt that that would produce a perfect storm that would ultimately choke off the funding that feeds The Beast.

The dumps of the entire Wikipedia histories are downloadable straight from Wikipedia's servers. Sorting those entries by IP address and grouping by IP block is really easy. Just import the database into mysql and run a query. It takes a couple days to download the database, and a couple more days to import it into mysql (depending on your bandwidth and CPU ability), but it's not particularly difficult work - just set it up in the background and leave.

I don't know where he got the whois information, but I assume that can be readily downloaded from somewhere as well.