Bob McCarty Writes

In a piece yesterday at WIRED.COM’s THREAT LEVEL blog, Kevin Paulsen predicted “a lot of sad, embarrassing secrets will emerge from this project once netizens dive into it — and we’d like to be a part of that.”

So would I!

The “project” Paulsen talked about is The Wikipedia Scanner, a tool which became the subject of a recent John Borland article at Wired.com. According to Borland, The Wikipedia Scanner is the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith. It’s hot, because it offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

After Borland’s story broke, other stories (re: “sad, embarrassing secrets”) surfaced about people working inside big organizations (i.e., Diebold, the CIA and more than one presidential campaign) editing Wikipedia entries to the benefit of their organizations — or, in the case of the latter example, their candidates.

Today, however, I made a Wikipedia Scanner-like discovery of my own using only the tools available on my WordPress blog. It happened while I was reviewing already-moderated comments related to an 11-day-old post about Mitt Romney in the “back office” of my blog.

I noticed that one person, “Kermit”, had made two pro-Mitt comments. One, in particular, read as follows:

“Oh yeah- by the way, this makes me lean a little more toward voting FOR Mitt Romney.”

While that might sound genuine, one look at the domain with which he is affiliated explains his tendency to “lean a little more toward” the former Massachusetts governor. To see what I’m talking about, take a look at the web URLs circled in red in the graphic below.

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