Wikiscanner discovered new changes on Wikipedia

Sep 5, 2007 08:14 GMT  ·  By

A few weeks ago, a revolutionary technology called WikiScanner caused a lot of trouble for some Internet companies and organizations as it discovered numerous modifications made by them in the Wikipedia articles. Since Wikipedia is an open-source solution, the articles can be edited by anybody in a matter of seconds. First, WikiScanner discovered that the CIA and the FBI modified numerous links and removed several pictures from the web-based encyclopedia.

Now, it revealed that some users browsing the Internet using Google IPs changed multiple sex-related articles such as 'Amateur Pornography', 'Mutual Masturbation' and even the 'List of male performers in gay porn films'.

Duncan Riley who discovered those WikiScanner entries wrote that "users of IP addresses registered to Google's Corporate IT Department edited a page pertaining to something called "Breast expansion fetishism".

This is quite funny when we think that Google is such a large company with people interested in editing the 'List of male performers in gay porn films'. But what the heck, we live in a free world and everybody can do whatever he wants unless he breaks the rules and editing the Wikipedia articles is quite a very useful activity.

WikiScanner was developed by Virgil Griffith, an American student and was first released on August 14, 2007. The technology is quite useful if we think that it analyzes the anonymous edits and provides the IP address of the computer, allowing us to discover valuable information about the user.

But this is not the only modification that was discovered by the recently introduced technology. As MsXbox World reports, the folks working at MSN Search also edited the article which described their product, adding a line that says "MSN Search is a major competitor to Google". If you want to track the latest changes discovered by WikiScanner, visit the official page of the product available here.