WikiScanner (also known as Wikipedia Scanner) was a publicly searchable database that linked anonymous edits on Wikipedia to the organizations where those edits apparently originated. It did this by cross-referencing the edits with data on the owners of the associated block of IP addresses, though it did not investigate edits made under a username. It was created by Virgil Griffith and released on August 13, 2007.
In his "WikiScanner FAQ" Griffith stated his belief that WikiScanner could help make Wikipedia more reliable for controversial topics. He also indicated that he had never been employed by the Wikimedia Foundation and claimed his work on WikiScanner was "100% noncommercial". On December 21, 2012, a research group from released an open-source clone of WikiScanner called WikiWatchdog.
By April 2013, attempts to run "WikiScanner Classic" from wikiscanner.virgil.gr returned to the WikiScanner home page, which identified itself as "WIKIWATCHER.COM"; and invoking "WikiScanner2 PreviewNew!" led to a "failure to load the page due to timeout" error.
In 2007, Virgil Griffith said he had to take WikiScanner down, as it was costing him "several thousand USD per month." He added below this on his WikiScanner webpage that as a grad student at Caltech in 2008 he developed with the aid of several undergraduates "a suite of Wikipedia-related tools known collectively as "WikiWatcher" which included: WikiScanner2 (Daniel), Wikiganda (Rishi), Poor Man's Checkuser, and BeaverScope," which he launched at the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference that year. They used used "high-quality data" from Quova, and among them WikiWatcher "had some media successes, but when the summer was over there was no one to maintain the tools and they fell into disrepair."
Design
The tool's database contained 34 million entries on anonymous edits (those by users who were not logged in to Wikipedia) between February 7, 2002, and August 4, 2007. Griffith stated that the database was constructed by compiling the anonymous edits included amongst the monthly public database dumps of Wikipedia. He claimed to have connected the organizations to their IP address with the assistance of the IP2Location database, and through comparison had found "187,529 different organizations with at least one anonymous Wikipedia edit."
WikiScanner only worked on anonymous edits, which are made under an IP address, not edits by anyone logged in under a username. It could not distinguish between edits made by authorized users of an organization, unauthorized intruders, or users of public-access computers that may have been using an organization's network. In discussing edits made from computers in the Vatican, computer expert Kevin Curran was quoted by the BBC as saying that it was "difficult to determine if the person was an employee or if they had maliciously hacked into the Vatican system and were 'spoofing' the IP address."
The WikiScanner FAQ noted that edits could not be positively attributed to representatives of a company, only to a computer logged into a company's network. The FAQ went on to say there is no guarantee that an edit was made by an authorized user rather than an intruder. The likelihood of such intrusions depended upon an organizations' network security; organizations such as the Vatican Library have public access terminals or networks.
Media coverage and reaction
According to Wired, which first broke the story on 13 August 2007, most edits were "fairly innocuous". Wired asked users to submit "The most shameful Wikipedia spin jobs", which generated many news stories about organizations, such as the Al-Jazeera network, Fox News Channel, staffers of Democratic Senator Robert Byrd and the CIA, that had edited Wikipedia articles.
On August 21, 2007, satirist Stephen Colbert who had long featured stories about Wikipedia and its "truthiness" on his program mocked WikiScanner creator Virgil Griffith's ambivalent stance on anonymity on Wikipedia, declaring it the "right" of corporations and governments to participate in the democratic process of deciding what is and is not true on Wikipedia.