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•Who's behind Wikipedia: Virgil Griffith's WikiScanner investigates
Journalism.co.uk, UK -13 minutes ago
Questions continue to be asked of the credibility of information on Wikipedia, but the online encyclopedia is increasingly becoming a tool - and often a ...
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QUOTE(Newsfeed @ Mon 11th August 2008, 8:40am) 
QUOTE
4) What's the purpose of the project?
VG: I am demonstrating that to have reliable information online doesn't mean we need to erect walls blocking anonymous contributions. Instead, we can do back-end analyses of the contributions to filter out the bad stuff.
VG: Overall — especially for non-controversial topics — Wikipedia seems to work. For controversial topics, Wikipedia can be made more reliable through techniques like this one. As for related approaches, I think colored text [a project that highlights Wikipedia articles in different colours according to their trustworthiness] is an immensely promising direction for combating disinformation in Wikipedia.
"Back-End Analysis" — HooHah — insert yer own joke here …
Now, I realize that it is perfectly politick for Virgil Griffith to take a Monsieur Nitouche — thass French for "Aw Shucks, Ma, I'm not doing nuttin" — stance on all this, but remarks like the above are likely to do little more than prolong the confusion, no matter how ironic some of our ears.
Jon
QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Mon 11th August 2008, 2:31pm)
QUOTE(Newsfeed @ Mon 11th August 2008, 8:40am)
QUOTE
4) What's the purpose of the project?
VG: I am demonstrating that to have reliable information online doesn't mean we need to erect walls blocking anonymous contributions. Instead, we can do back-end analyses of the contributions to filter out the bad stuff.
VG: Overall — especially for non-controversial topics — Wikipedia seems to work. For controversial topics, Wikipedia can be made more reliable through techniques like this one. As for related approaches, I think colored text [a project that highlights Wikipedia articles in different colours according to their trustworthiness] is an immensely promising direction for combating disinformation in Wikipedia.
"Back-End Analysis" — HooHah — insert yer own joke here …
Now, I realize that it is perfectly politick for Virgil Griffith to take a Monsieur Nitouche — thass French for "Aw Shucks, Ma, I'm not doing nuttin" — stance on all this, but remarks like the above are likely to do little more than prolong the confusion, no matter how ironic some of our ears.
Jon
I've just had his little chat playing in the background and looked up his new tools. Nothing much to see, though some people who know might just spot something of interest here (less sockpuppets, more potential relationships between editors). I don't think there was anything profound - just the observation that by scraping the Wikipedia database you can find relationships (and also that the NOINDEX tag for web pages is a red rag to a data mining bull because that is where all the interesting stuff is).
He only seems to project a "Interesting, but so what?" and ultimately, without the underlying data, he cannot really analyse the ills of Wikipedia. If WikiScanner was an internal tool of Wikipedia, being used to root out evil doers without fear or favour, then it might be more interesting, but as it stands the message is coming across that "WikiScanner can find you, so all is well" which is not true. For example, I didn't see any damning evidence against the people I am aware of jumping out.
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