Wikipedia is great – I really love it. Obviously the power behind Wikipedia is that it is constantly evolving through the edits of the internet community.

A guy named Virgil Griffith has developed Wiki Scanner which allows you to partially trace ‘anonymous’ Wikipedia edits. For those who care, this works by doing a whois on the IP of the editing user.

Anyway, some interesting edits have been revealed using this tool.

Some examples from Wired:

• “Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example, with someone at the company’s IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry’s concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company’s CEO’s fund-raising for President Bush.”
• Wal-Mart was more subtle, for example: “changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage”

There are lots of other examples – the whole thing is generating a lot of interest.