another limit of community-managed content....

I decided to spend some time working with the tool created by Virgil Griffith and reviewing a list of example, anonymous edits made to Wikipedia pages.

The Diebold edits are the most instructive. Information stripped from the company's Wikipedia entry on November 17, 2005 by an anonymous Wikipedia user working from a Diebold computer (based upon the IP address) includes:

In August [[2003]], [[Walden O'Dell]], chief executive of Diebold, announced that he had been a top fund-raiser for [[President of the United States|President]] [[George W. Bush]] and had sent a get-out-the-funds letter to [[Ohio]] [[United States Republican Party|Republicans]].....

Sludge further cites [[Votewatch]] for evidence that suggests a pattern of compromised voting machine exploits throughout the 1990s, and specifically involving the Diebold machines in the 2002 election.

Earlier, I wrote about the strengths and weaknesses of the Wikipedia model, described in recent books by Thomas Friedman and Lawrence Lessig. In my view, the publicity surrounding Griffith's analysis tool will fix little, if anything, with Wikipedia. It will instead lead companies to employ anonymizing tools to evade detection of these kinds of edits in the future.