Has anyone found any tasty New Zealand stuff with Wikipedia Scanner?
I looked up some IP addresses logged against dodgy edits of New Zealand Wikipedia articles -- the old-fashioned way, rather than with the scanner -- but didn't find anything of interest. Part of the problem is that addresses here tend to resolve to third parties: so there's a bit of vandalism on the Helen Clark article from an IP address in the same block as the National Party's mail server -- but it's also the same block (controlled by dts.net.nz) as the Parliamentary web server, which doesn't tell you much.
I did also run Fonterra's address block (202.50.185.0-255) through the scanner, but it could find no Wiki-fiddling from that quarter. [Update: I screwed that up - here's a list from the Fonterra block. Nothing controversial, unless you object violently to pro wrestling.]
Any readers with Friday on their minds and more knowledge of where the netblocks are than me is more than welcome to have a play and let us all know about items of interest.
If you didn't understand the above, read this and this, and then feast your peepers on the Fox News roll of shame -- vanity editing, infantile vandalism of articles about Fox News critics -- which would damage Fox's reputation if it had one left to damage.
Wired's wikidgame page has a burgeoning list of entries -- including one from an ExxonMobil employee who changed the article on the disastrous Exxon Valdez spill to attribute a native tribe's bankruptcy not to the effects of the spill but to "bad luck and poor investments."
See also how some clown from Amnesty International deleted the entire "criticism and rebuttal" section on AI's article. People at Diebold have been even more assiduous about deleting criticism of its voting machines. Electronic Arts has tried to rewrite the history of gaming. There's a lot more like that.
One thing that many media reports have missed is that this has always been possible on Wikipedia, which records both the IP address of anyone who makes an anonymous edit, and the edit itself. Virgil Griffith just pulled down the data and mashed in a few public tools. It's an interesting example of how many small pieces of information be come much more interesting if you can consolidate and index them. It should also be noted that that nearly everything picked up with the scanner has long been recitified.
Griffth's stated aim for the project -- to make his site the top Google result fore the query "virgil" -- doesn't seem to be going too well though.
Moving on: so farewell then, Karl Rove. Most interesting analysis, James Carville in the Financial Times. Most hilariously sucky-up ("the greatest political mind of his generation and probably of any generation" -- so, like ever, then?): this guy.
And does anyone get Ann Althouse? Allegedly, she's a "formidable" legal blogger, but every time I look at her blog she seems to have having some stupid adolescent blogfight going with someone. She strikes me as a bit of a noob. The reliably amusing Instaputz has been keeping score.
Hugo Chavez: tomorrow's Mugabe? Quite apart from his proposed abolition of term limits, his purge on local government structure in Venezuala is pretty much the same thing as the Thatcher government's dissolution of the Greater London Council and the Republican Party's Texas redistricting: an abuse of power.
On another topic entirely, the Herald's world pages had a story this week on the discovery that Bronze Age Irishmen not only knew how to make beer around 1500 BC, but made it in quite some quantity. The story noted that archaeologists had replicated the method and made Bronze age beer - but neglected to include a surely important piece of information: what did the sodding stuff taste like?
Fortunately, other organisations did think to tell us:
Three hundred litres of water were transformed into a "very palatable" 110 litres of frothy ale.
"It tasted really good," said Mr Quinn, of Moore Archaeological and Environmental Services (Moore Group).
"We were very surprised. Even a professional brewer we had working with us compared it favourably to his own.
"It tasted like a traditional ale, but was sweeter because there were no hops in it."
And there is in fact extensive detail on The Great Beer Experiment. If you do try this at home, be sure to send me some.
And finally, one more pitch for episode one of the Public Address Big Stereo Bundle - a batch of 10 top downloads from Amplifier for the price of, er, seven and a half. We've had hundreds of tyre-kickers, not quite so many buyers.