Don't Mess With the Crowd
Posted by Joe Lichtenberg on Fri, Aug 17, 2007 @ 02:02 PM
It turns out that Wikipedia so well reflects the wisdom of the crowd, that even when those with a vested interest try to pull a fast one, the crowd steps up and takes action.
Suspecting self-serving manipulation of entries by corporations and other organizations, a CalTech grad student wrote a system that "offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses," according to an article in Wired.
According to Wired, "The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made. Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material. Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President Bush. The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, ‘Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism.'"
And in true "crowdsourcing" fashion, the developer of the system is putting the whole thing online so that anyone who wants to can search the edits.
This is Web 2.0 at its finest.
The overwhelming message to organizations that aren't sure how to work with the read/write web: just remember that the world is a lot savvier than you might think. If for no other, higher reasons, don't try to game the system. Or at the very least, if you do, don't do it from your computer at work.