I SAW WHAT YOU DID THERE.

[reddragdiva]

WikiScanner is taking the press by storm. Two calls today from the BBC and one from The Independent. The line I took:

• We've had conflicted editing since the beginning, and companies getting caught out. This is just another example. We've told people over and over, and now this is hitting the press and the general public are up in arms about it.
• The almost-complete edit history of Wikipedia has always been available — click on the "history" tab. And people have been caught with it before. This is another approach to the same thing.
• We don't try to nail companies on it, because we appreciate they sometimes just don't know how to approach us. We don't want people scared to talk to us.
• The best way to deal with problems in your entry is to be completely honest and open about who you are and why you're there. In general, getting caught out being less than utterly honest online will get you eaten alive.
• If something's dangerous or slanderous, of course, contact the Foundation and you can be sure it'll be looked at seriously and quickly.

So I'm on BBC Radio 5 Live on Wake up To Money tomorrow morning around 5:55am. (There's an MP3 podcast of it.) The things I do for Wikipedia ... They got Virgil Griffiths, who wrote WikiScanner, to comment as well. Should be interesting.

By the way: I told you so.

Update: One quote! I got up at 5:45am for one quote! Mind you, I did start to waffle. MP3, 20:25 to 23:24. Pretty good.

Comments

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

Mmm. We're getting pretty good coverage from this - I like that the tone is 'faintly outraged people are doing silly things to a fine upstanding site', which is an advance on most!

I do wonder how accurate it is for old data, though. I mean, some of the edits are two or three years old - what proportion of corporate networks are in the same IP ranges now as they were back then? Changes aren't uncommon...

[reddragdiva]

They change, but not over that short a timeframe.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but when you're dealing with so many organisations, the size of the population means uncommon events crop up.

(I know we changed at work last year, and had apparently done so again a few years previous - it was a real hassle because so many subscription resources were working by IP address, and we didn't catch them all for ages)

[vatine]

To the etent that people change ISP, basically. One of the reasons the leased-line market is not nearly as fluid as one might've thought (it's a right royal pain renumbering everything, it's a right royal pain to NAT, it's a right royal pain getting a PI allocation).