A CalTech graduate student, Virgil Griffith, has developed a tool that can be used to disclose who edits certain pages from the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The innovating tool called WikiScanner is a Web site that can trace the source of millions of alterations that are made on the online encyclopedia. In fact the concept behind WikiScanner is quite simple. The tool grabs the Internet Protocol addresses of the computers used to edit Wikipedia pages and by comparing that with public information about which addresses belong to whom it reveals a possible identity of the editors.  

The tool, which is available at http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr, has revealed that some entries have been edited by the CIA, Vatican, Associated Press or other companies that apparently do have some interests.

Griffith revealed that what determined him to create the free Scanner was hearing that members of Congress were editing their own entries.

It appears that not only they made the self-interest alterations. Last year PepsiCo just erased the paragraphs talking about side-effects the beverage may had on health. Also, according to WikiScanner, CIA had modified the figures that were estimated on the Iraq war and FBI removed aerial and satellite images of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"Overall - especially for non-controversial topics - Wikipedia already works," Griffith said on his website.

"For controversial topics, Wikipedia can be made more reliable through techniques like this one ... to counteract vandalism and disinformation."

Sandy Ordonez, a spokeswoman of the Wikimedia declared that the encyclopedia discourages self-interest editing. "We don't make it an absolute rule" she said quoted by Reuters, "but it's definitely a guideline"

Internet experts and prestigious personalities alike have welcomed the WikiScanner, highlighting that the gist of Wikipedia is to provide reliable, unbiased information about a large scope of subjects and it public-relations strategies definitely alter it into something preferential.

In an interview with The New York Times, Jimmy Wales pinpoints that visitors should understand that they can be recorded and should behave.“When someone clicks on 'edit,' it would be interesting if we could say, “Hi, thank you for editing. We see you're logged in from The New York Times. Keep in mind that we know that, and it's public information.” That might make them stop and think.”

Wikipedia, which was launched as an English language project on January 15, 2001 as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct Nupedia, has grown into one of the biggest virtual communities in the world. But all throughout time there has been a lot of debate concerning the identity of the people that edit pages from Wikipedia.

For example, earlier this year, Microsoft acknowledged it approached technology blogger Rick Jelliffe and offered to pay him to correct what the company saw as inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an open-source document standard and a rival format Microsoft prefers.

Also in March, it was revealed that Ryan Jordan, a college dropout deceived the trust of Wikipedia users by portraying himself as a prominent theology professor, thus becoming one of the most respected members of the Wiki community, with more than 20,000 pages of information edited under the pseudo “Essjay”.  Maybe, thanks to WikiScanner, this kind of situations might be avoided in the future.

Meanwhile Jimmy Wales announced that is working on a new project, a search engine based on the same idea as Wikipedia. The Wikia Inc. search engine plans to capture as much as 5 percent of the search market and its collaborative search technology could transform the Internet's power structure, according to Wales.