What's interesting here is that Wikinews seems to be doing a much better job at connecting the data dots than some of the larger commercial news organizations covering the story -- not because Wikinews volunteers have access to facts that other reporters do not, but because they appear to be looking harder for them. Also, while some dirty digital deeds were done, Wikinews reports that most of the edits attributed to Capitol Hill computers improved accuracy. Snip:

Using the public history of edits on Wikipedia, Wikinews reporters collected every Senate IP which had ever edited on Wikipedia as of February 3 and examined where the IPs came from, what they edited, and of what those edits consisted. IP, or Internet Protocol, addresses are unique numbers electronic devices use to communicate with each other on an individual basis.

The investigation showed the vast majority of edits to Wikipedia from Senate IPs were beneficial, helpful edits. Examples Include the creation of the article on Click Back America, which organizes students to promote microfinance in the developing world, and Washington's Tomb, which was originally designed to hold the body of first U.S. President George Washington within the White House Capitol building, and significantly expanding the article on closed sessions of the United States Senate in November. Dozens of small corrections to grammar, spelling, or small facts—many of them related to the Senate—show Senate Wikipedia users have sharp eyes for details and help improve Wikipedia's accuracy.

(...) IP address mapping: The U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms owns the IP block 156.33.0.0 to 156.33.255.255. Requests to learn the mapping of these thousands of IPs were not responded to at press time. However, the lower 100 blocks of addresses appear to be mapped to the 100 Senators based on their state's alphabetical listing. This was partially confirmed using e-mail responses from the offices of Senators; where the originating computer was connected to the network directly and was not a part of block 222 (a section which seems to be reserved for servers), the IP addresses matched the prediction pattern.

When examining the edit behavior of IPs it also tended to match the predicted pattern. IPs which were assigned to Florida had edits to Bill Nelson and Mel Martinez and other Florida-related pages primarily, while those assigned to California had edited Dianne Feinstein. Edits coming from the U.S. House of Representatives were less traceable because they came through a proxy server---meaning they all showed up under one IP address.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:09:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments