In “See Who’s Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign,” which appeared in Wired News yesterday, writer John Borland tells us about a new tool which allows you to see which companies have been editing which Wikipedia entries.

Wikipedia Scanner is the brainchild of Virgil Griffith, a Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student. It offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

“What has Dow Chemical been doing on the ‘Breast Implants’ page?” we wondered, but were disappointed to find that the function to check edits on particular pages to be temporarily shut down due to the (presumably) huge surge in traffic from the Wired News article.

As luck would have it, Wired’s Threat Level blog invites people to post and vote on the most egregious edits they can find, and someone had already run a check on Dow. Indeed, Dow removed references to Bhopal, Agent Orange and…BREAST IMPLANTS!

See for yourself. This page shows all the Wikipedia edits from one of Dow’s IP addresses. The second column shows you what entry was changed, and the third column shows the actual changes. If you scroll about halfway down to the line that shows changes to the “Dow Chemical Company entry,” you’ll see that changes were made in the section on “Environmental and human rights controversies.” Click on the number 94630422, and the breast implant reference that was deleted appears in the top screen.

Horrible company, but a very useful tool. We are going to bookmark it for future use.