logo_wiki

Update 12.may.09:

logo_wiki is working!

The program may return an error, sometimes because Wikipedia have made changes to their website. Try later, and if that does not work, please,
Report problems to:
vacua__AT_btinternet_D OT_com

logo_wiki featured in Futuresonic Manchester.

It is also part of Anti Social Notworking at project.arnolfini.

It went to Valencia for After the Net as part of Observatori.

l
logo_wiki was in Athens for Mirfestival 12-20.September.08.

There is a short film about logo_wiki here (it has Spanish and English subtitles. There is a higher quality version - bigger file size - here).

Some press links and images here.

A short essay: Surveillance and the art of software maintenance.

[ New: logo_wiki now will always find an edited page. If it can't find a new page,
it will show you the last page it found until it gets a new one. ]

In September 07 Luke Munn at the Window Project in Auckland approached me to make an artwork
about political intervention in Wikipedia, "the open content encyclopedia".

Luke told me about some software (WikiScanner) by Virgil Griffith that tracks edits in Wikipedia.
It traces the IP addresses of military, governmental and corporate users.
I ended up making several pieces of work, including logo_wiki.

logo_wiki looks for Big Brother editors of Wikipedia. It shows you the Wikipedia page with the edits.
It tells you who the editor is by replacing the Wikipedia logo with the editor's logo.

Tech: *due to a glitch in Internet Explorer, logo_wiki should be viewed in Mozilla/Firefox*

>> logo_wiki

Please give the software time to load. It's checking 5000 edits.
It checks again for updates every few seconds and chooses a new random recent edit .
So, please wait a few moments to see what it finds.
It may choose the same one more than once.
There may be no recent edits, particularly nightimes/weekends in the Western hemisphere.
It all depends on editor activity.

Example pages: Dominic Grieve's (UK politician) page edited to remove reference to Zimbabwe
Reference to Lehman Brothers removed from page on market debt
Microsoft edit a page on security in the aftermath of 9/11

(If Wikipedia is down, logo_wiki won't run.)

A selected list of Wikipedia's shadowy editors:

Department of Veterans Affairs
Department of Homeland Security
U.S. House of Representatives
The Boeing Company
General Motors Corporation
U.S. Department of Defence
Australian Department of Defence
Pentagon
HKSAR Government
Exxon Mobil Corporation
Dell
Amazon
Unilever
Johnson and Johnson
General Electric Company
Goldman Sachs
MetLife
Wells Fargo

NASA
Deutsche Bank
IBM
U.S. Air Force
Bank of America
Raytheon Company
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Performance Systems International Inc.
Shell Oil
UK Cabinet Office Intranet
UK Parliament
Microsoft
Merrill Lynch
Royal Bank of Scotland
ROLLS-ROYCE
Bank of New York Mellon
Morgan Stanley Group
AIG

(Criterion: more than 500 edits each to get in the list. The list will be added to over time)

It has been found that government, corporate, and military users have edited pages on Wikipedia.
Some may feel this is in contradiction to Wikipedia's fundamental neutrality policy. This issue has
been a major political controversy in Australia.

logo_wiki shows you shadowy editors at work in real time.
It is because it is in real time that occasionaly there may be no new edits or few edits.

Credits:

Thanks: Luke Munn at the Window Project.

Acknowledgement: Wikiscanner by Virgil Griffith for good example and statistics. (Read about it here.)

Credit: All logo images are courtesy of Picsearch.

             Wayne Clements

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