Impossible

There has been some really fun stories comming out recently concerning WikiScanner. WikieScanner is a website that correlates changes made to Wiki pages to the IP address that made it. What really fun about this is that now all kinsd of juvinelle Wiki edits are being tracked back to the oganization that made the changes.

Of course journalist are among the worst of those displaying such immature behaviour, especially those working at the NYTs:

Last year, someone using a computer at the Washington Post Company changed the name of the owner of a free local paper, The Washington Examiner, from Philip Anschutz to Charles Manson. A person using a computer at CBS updated the page on Wolf Blitzer of CNN to add that his real name was Irving Federman. (It is actually Wolf Blitzer.)

And The New York Times Company is among those whose employees have made, among hundreds of innocuous changes, a handful of questionable edits. A change to the page on President Bush, for instance, repeated the word “jerk” 12 times. And in the entry for Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, the word “pianist” was changed to “penis.”

“It’s impossible to determine who did any of these things,” said Craig R. Whitney, the standards editor of The Times. “But you can only shake your head when you see what was done to the George Bush and Condoleezza Rice entries.”

[Emphasis added]

It’s interesting to see what the NYTs thinks is impossible. I bet that if the employees were posting things critical of the NYT, they might try a little harder to discover the offender.