"Wikipedia Editors"

I'm intrigued lately about the news that a 24-year-old graduate student has created an online tool that will allow anyone to identify the editors of Wikipedia entries. It's called WikiScanner and you can link to it here.

(Just a side note: I'm so proud of myself for figuring out the HTML to allow me to put links manually into my blog's body instead of just the title, which can be done via WYSIWYG using Blogger's tools. This need only appears when I'm using Zoe's MacBook; on my home or office PC, the Blogger WYSIWYG tools allow in-text links -- I wonder why the difference.)

Okay, back to the cool WikiScanner: you can't really find out the actual *person* who made the edits (for example, I edited Century College's page - correcting some mechanical errors and adding the name of our WGST chair). But you can find out the owner of the computer that was used to edit (such as the CIA or PepsiCo or the Republican Party). You can then make the logical inference that an employee of said entity (or person who has access to the computers owned by these entities) made the edits.

Find out more about Virgil Griffith, the fellow who created this tool.