Who's editing Wikipedia?

Want to know what articles in Wikipedia the CIA has edited? How about the DNC or RNC?

This very nice graduate student at Cal Tech, named Virgil Griffith, made a "little app" that will tell you just that (with some precision). The WikiScanner correlates the anonymized IP addresses from Wiki's change logs with various IP identifying databases (mostly public), like ARIN.

Very cool uses of this? Many. One highlight: identifying the culprit behind the mass deletion of critical parts of the Diebold company's description in Wikipedia, just following some e-voting machine ruckus around November 2005. Said, named culprit? Someone within the corporate headquarters of Diebold. Shocker, I know.

Nicely done, Virgil!