Ask any teen if they're familiar with Wikipedia and they will enthusiastically nod "yes." It's their homework lifeline to the chagrin of many educators who lament that it's often used as an original source in many-a-term paper. There has been lots of debate over the accuracy of Wikipedia compared to other encyclopedias (see danah boyd's "knowledge Access as a Public Good"), but most people would agree that it's not the best source to cite.

Virgil Griffith [pictured in photo], who according to Slate, is "a self-described 'disruptive technologist' and future CalTech graduate student," created a site called WikiScanner where he took "the 34,417,493 anonymous edits added between February 2004 and August 2007 and correlate them with the IP addresses of hedge funds, law firms, media companies, the CIA, and the rest of us."

The Slate story rounded up what WikiScanner uncovered:

A Scientology IP added a link to the Kurt Cobain page that suggests the singer's childhood Ritalin prescription led him to suicide. An Exxon IP cleaned up the section on the effects of the Valdez oil spill, cheerfully noting "six of the largest salmon harvests in history were recorded in the decade immediately following the spill." A Philip Morris IP deleted this sentence from a history paragraph of the "Marlboro (cigarette)" page: "It emerged as the number one youth-initiation brand."

Just because an IP address can be traced to a particular company, doesn't mean it definitely came from someone who works for the company. It could have come from someone with access to their network -- still if it was made between the hours of 9 to 5, chances are...

Caveats aside, for educators who want ammunition to explain why they are not allowing students to cite Wikipedia as a source (they can certainly use the site and cite valid sources they discover via a Wikipedia entry), WikiScanner is the perfect way to illustrate the potential for bias, inaccuracy and vandalism that occurs on Wikipedia. It's also important to talk about how Wikipedia's army of volunteer editors are constantly on the look out for this type of misinformation and regularly make edits of their own to clean it up.