Tracking Changes

From Wired.com:

"Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith just launched an unofficial Wikipedia search tool that threatens to lay bare the ego-editing and anonymous flacking on the site. Enter the name of a corporation, organization or government entity and you get a list of IP addresses assigned to it. Then with one or two clicks, you can see all the anonymous edits made from those addresses anywhere in Wikipedia's pages."

So basically, if you want to see how groups are altering Wikipedia entries, you can now find out.

The result? Wired has compiled a list of links to folks who've done a lot of work trying to take down their ideological opposites. Their list can be found here. BoingBoing.net posted a link to this list of edits made by Fox News. I wonder where the right-wingers are in this debacle.

Opinion-based questions: Yes, this is confirmation of something we've all suspected. Are we that surprised? Does it make those editors wrong? Does it not just point out flaws in the initial "journalistic" quality of Wikipedia entries to begin with (not that I ever saw the word "journalistic" in any of Wikipedia's missives on its raison d'etre).