TASSY P2P FORUMS

NEW online tool called WikiScanner reveals just who has been making changes to the pages of online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

As the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, Wikipedia encourages participants to adopt online user names, but it also lets contributors be identified simply by their computers' IP addresses.

Often they do not provide much of a cloak.

In one case, PCs in US congressional offices were discovered to have been involved in Wikipedia entries trashing political rivals.

Those episodes inspired Virgil Griffith, a computer scientist about to enter grad school at CalTech, to automate the process with WikiScanner.

The tool is located at http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr but intense attention has knocked it out of service many times this week.

The free scanner grabs the IP addresses used in anonymous Wikipedia edits in the past five years. By combining that with public information about which IP addresses belong to whom, the scanner reveals Wikipedia changes made from computers assigned to a bevy of organisations.

Many of the edits are predictably self-interested. For example, PCs in the Church of Scientology were used to remove criticism in the church's Wikipedia entry. But others hint at bored office workers, such as the tweaks to Wikipedia articles on TV shows being made from CIA computers.

Examples are being tallied at http://wired.reddit.com/wikidgame - a page run by Wired News.

Mr Griffith wrote on his site that he hopes "to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike".

Whatever comes of it, WikiScanner has a fan in Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. "It is fabulous and I strongly support it," Mr Wales said.