Wikiscanner Greatest Hits Vol 1: ExxonMobil - Oceana USA
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August 16, 2007

Wikiscanner Greatest Hits Vol 1: ExxonMobil

So by now you’ve probably heard about wikiscanner, right? Wired.com ran the story a few days ago, and they were interviewed on NPR this morning.

The upshot is that Cal Tech grad student Virgil Griffith wrote a Web app that uses IP addresses to reveal the locations of folks who’ve made edits to Wikipedia entries. The story gets interesting because a ton of companies and orgs are essentially caught trying to polish up their own images. There’s an entertaining list on wired.com with some of their favorites.

The app itself is mostly non-functional right now due to all the hype it’s getting. The list at wired.com includes an edited description of the impact of the Valdez oil spill.

This isn’t what ExxonMobil’s Wikipedia entry looks like now, but it’s what somebody edited it to say in December of 2004 – and the somebody worked at an IP address that traces back to ExxonMobil’s offices.

Awkward!