Wikipedia Vandals Exposed!

...And they are, apparently, among the U.S.'s most cherished institutions.

The BBC reported yesterday that a new program called "Wikipedia Scanner" allows users to track Wikipedia edits back to their sources via IP address association.

While the media attention given to IP-address tracking seems relatively new, the method used by the program is anything but. At a forum I used to monitor, staff members once tracked down a user's residential address using little but an IP address and google after he posted a suicide note on the forum — a serious one. An administrator called the appropriate county authorities and, as far as events thereafter indicated, a suicide was prevented.

Forums with registered members or any sort of IP logging mechanism have had this ability for years.

What is interesting about the BBC report, though, is that IP addresses traced back to the CIA and the U.S. Democratic Party appear to have engaged in myriad acts of Wikipedia Vandalism.

Not only were these clear acts of vandalism, instead of say, what you'd expect from the CIA — questionable NPOV editing — they were outright moronic acts of vandalism, too. One edit traced to a CIA computer involved nothing but the insertion of the term "Wahhhhhh!" into Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Wikipedia bio.

(...makes me wonder if anyone at the vaunted Liberal Party of Canada or CPC has been tampering with Wikipedia's pages on Canadian politics... perhaps I should take a gander and find out...)