Jan 18, 2010
Wikiwatching
In February’s Harper’s, Jaron Lanier—the man who coined the phrase “virtual reality”—uses a new phrase with sound bite potential. “Oracle illusion” as defined by Lanier, is the super-human validity attributed to text when authorship is suppressed, such as it is on sites like Wikipedia.
Concurrently, it seems WikiScanner, the brainchild a Virgil Griffith (a PhD candidate at Caltech’s Computation and Neural Systems department), is about to roll out its version 2.0. The project links the IP addresses of corporate companies to Wikipedia edits—so that effectually you can see when, for example, Kmart has edited their own entry or others.
via http://virgil.gr/