As a Wikipedia fan, I was delighted when CalTech grad student Virgil Griffith came out with his Wikipedia Scanner, a way to find out who produced which ‘edits’ on what entries, for what self-serving or embarrassing purposes. U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms, here we come.

Following this breaking news, some Net-wise periodicals have been in hot pursuit of the usual suspects including our CIA. The Vatican, Wal-Mart and some electronic voting-machine company have also lent themselves to becoming early, easy targets, trust them for that.

A few hours of late-night sleuthing -- fun.

For the record – warning: disclaimer alert -- I individually absolutely do not fear embarrassment or worse in this game, having contributed exactly one (1) of the 34 million-plus edits in Wikipedia, and that one not for any nefarious reason except accuracy with regard to a public figure in the news at the time, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. (How did any of our journalistic aces, let alone all of them, fail to notice that when a man’s name is followed by the abbreviation “Jr,” among English speakers it means that his name is the same as his father’s?)

I actually regret that I couldn’t put in the time for scholarly edits, for example on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; 2500 years' worth of literary figures have made the Wiki cut, and most of them need help from the Internet. Cyberspace needs to give our libraries all the help it can give. Free people, free libraries. On the whole, it's heartening to sleuth out indications that some personnel in the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Postal Service have classical backgrounds. A good working knowledge of classical antiquity probably beats prior experience in “communications” – flak catcher, in Tom Wolfe’s phrase -- any time, if you want terrain fertile for developing analytical ability. But back to the previous graf, anyone who thinks I was ever capable of being gulled into thinking anything on the Net is “anonymous” significantly misunderestimated me. It’s one thing I have in common with GWBush. Too bad my scholarly contributions to Wikipedia will have to wait until retirement, and in such a ‘then’ I write a ‘never’.*

Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, some individual at the Washington Post added external links to the ‘Bob Woodward’ page in Wikipedia. Washington Post employees also provided 2 edits re ‘Sally Quinn’. Another WP individual pathetically provided material on ‘notable residents’ of wealthy ‘Potomac, MD’. I have nothing against Potomac, Maryland, where my retired dentist lives, but their residents have some notable property including the ground under gun shops, not in their own county but in mine, and in my view the WP could beneficially have pursued that story.**

Speaking of neighboring counties, IP ranges also show that individuals in the Montgomery County, Maryland, government posted at least 2 edits for the ‘Itty Bitty Titty Committee’ and another couple for ‘abortion clinic’. Interesting but perhaps not deeply significant.

Generally you can discern which parents paid too much for their kids’ private schools via the desperation with which these parents use their time at work to tout the schools’ names and famous alumni. This broad general point applies to employees in public and private sectors.

Time and space prohibit finishing this nearly inexhaustible Wikipedia topic. Broadly, big contributors are the entities you would predict, and the huge contributors are really predictable, Microsoft and Comcast for example. Lockheed Martin is also huge in the wiki pages, as are branches of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. Universities tend, not surprisingly, to contribute copiously. So do newspapers; the New York Times, to its credit, copped to some of its more embarrassing contributions right up front.

Also broadly, contributions tend to flow top-of-the-charts toward pop culture – music, movies, television – with some maybe valuable trivia for the future scholarly miner.

Regrettably, the Wikipedia Scanner search function for individual entry pages is disabled for now. That one should yield some validly pointed results, once the “the onslaught of traffic wanes” as Mr. Griffith puts it.

 
* Shakespearean allusion. Look it up.       ** See previous literary allusion.