Logo_Wiki, who’s that Wikipedia editor?

Logo_Wiki

The “Logo_Wiki” project by Wayne Clements catalogs some of the institutions (companies and government agencies) involved in editing Wikipedia pages in order to expose how these entities are skewing the information on the free, online encyclopedia. Clements adds the logos of the offending corporations where the Wikipedia logo is supposed to be in order to drive his point further. This form of viewing the special interests editing public websites was made possible with “WikiScanner”, a software tool written by Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith. Griffith’s project created a searchable database that ties edits from the popular encyclopedia to organizations, allowing one to see where they originated by cross-referencing edits with information on the owners of the poster’s IP addresses. So the next time you look up a historical fact about your country’s military activity, or some corporate facts, on the popular site, be sure to double check your sources or face the consequences.

Jonah Brucker-Cohen