SourceWatch:Project:Tracking attempts to spin Wikipedia

The goal of this project is to make a record in SourceWatch of the anonymous edits to Wikipedia made by computers at government agencies, companies and organizations that were "salacious" - those that smell of whitewashing, greenwashing or disinformation. Using the "WikiScanner" - a program that matches the IP addresses of anonymous edits to Wikipedia against known blocks of IP addresses - a number of these edits have been identified by citizens (some of them are unbelievable). One of the central uses of SourceWatch is to document spin and disinformation campaigns by these sorts of folks, so this project is aimed at adding them into their respective profiles here.

Background information and instructions are below. If you have any questions about how to do this project or just need a little help, feel free to email SourceWatch staff editor Conor Kenny at conor[at]sourcewatch.org (replace the "[at]" with an "@" - done to prevent spam).

Background
The WikiScanner searches Wikipedia edits by IP address. Edits made to Wikipedia by logged-in users are recorded under their username while edits made while not logged-in are recorded under the IP address of the computer making the edit. Because the IP address range of many companies, organizations and government agencies are known, the Wikiscanner tool can be used to identify edits made from their computers by users who are not logged-in.

Many edits that violate Wikipedia's rules on conflict of interest edits - defined as "disregard[ing] the aims of Wikipedia to advance outside interests" - are made while not logged-in, perhaps in an effort to disguise the identity of an editor engaged in "disinformation" "greenwashing" or other PR-minded changes to an article. The Wikiscanner makes it possible to determine the location of the computer used to makes those edits.

Caveat: The Wikipedia Scanner generally cannot determine the identity of the specific person making the edit and the fact that an edit is made on an organization's computer does not mean that the edits were officially sanctioned. Also, just because an edit is made while not logged-in does not make it necessarily malicious (though many are); you have to check the specific edit to make that conclusion.

For more information see this Wired article.

Finding spin edits
The easiest way to find suspect edits is to check the user-generated list of hundreds of such edits hosted by Wired and Reddit. You can find the list here. These are edits found by users that are voted up or down by other users, so the more interesting ones are likely to be found if you click on "top-rated". Not all are significant enough or appropriate for SourceWatch, but the policies here are pretty loose as to what is appropriate, so if in doubt go ahead and add it in.

Recording spin edits in SourceWatch
We want to keep everything fully documented in keeping with SourceWatch's policies on referencing. Here's a step-by-step process with an example below it (you may want to open a few browser windows or tabs to make this easy):

Articles added to under this project

 * ChevronTexaco
 * Raytheon
 * Clear Channel Communications
 * Hill & Knowlton goes to the Maldives
 * Amway
 * Diebold
 * Fox News
 * Science Applications International Corporation
 * Philip Morris