The civil servants who allegedly changed Wikipedia entries about Hillsborough might not be as lost in the group as they think, explains Andrew Smith. This page was published over five years ago. Please be aware that due to the passage of time, the information provided on this page may be out of date or otherwise inaccurate, and any views or opinions expressed may no longer be relevant. Some technical elements such as audio-visual and interactive media may no longer work. For more detail, see our Archive and Deletion Policy.
Giulia Forsythe under CC-BY licence under Creative-Commons license Although a group endeavour, individuals leave digital fingerprints when they edit Wikipedia According to the Liverpool Echo , UK government computers have been used to make offensive comments on the Wikipedia page detailing the Hillsbourgh Disaster over a number of years. They include insults to Liverpool fans and a comment suggesting that fans were responsible for the football ground disaster, in which 96 people died.
This case highlights the continual issue of trolling and cybervandalism on Wikipedia. It also shows how journalism is using good, technical forensic tools at the disposal of every cybercitizen.
So many of us use Wikipedia on a daily basis that it is one of the most visited websites in the world. Yet not that many of us really understand how it works. Wikipedia is based on the principle that the community can create, edit and refine pages covering practically any topic. Some entries are very accurate and others need improving. That is part of the power that comes from a repository of knowledge that is run by cybercitizens. Lots of people now generally recognise that Wikipedia is a good place to start when learning about a topic.
But we are also learning the dangers of taking what is posted on Wikipedia as read. Students are discouraged from referencing Wikipedia because it can change in minutes and journalists have been stung in the past when printing what they find on the site without verifying it elsewhere. In principle, if you are someone of note or have information about a new topic that has not yet been covered on Wikipedia, you are welcome to create the page, including accurate referenced content.
But you must also understand that others will edit your work. Most changes are made in the spirit of making Wikipedia entries more accurate but there have been occasions where government bodies have been found editing their Wiki sites to make them more flattering or of the staff of politicians editing the pages of rivals to make them less flattering.
If you pick any Wikipedia page, you can see a view history tab on the far right. When you edit a Wikipedia page, you can either log in or complete this task anonymously.
If you are logged in, it will display your username and the edit you have made. If you have done so anonymously, it will just record your IP address. Wikipedia does not object to anonymous entries. Not everyone wishes to be tracked and they may have perfectly sensible reasons for that. But, unfortunately for the rest of us, some users exploit the anonymous editing feature to make unreasonable changes. But every IP address on the internet has an owner.
It could be a government organisation, a commercial entity or your service provider giving you access to the internet. A network of organisations across the world, such as RIPE , maintains the database of which addresses is used by whom.
The site will do the rest for you. While you personally cannot prove which person made the entry, what the Liverpool Echo is relying on is the knowledge that all good network engineers that manage large networks, such as those run by the UK government, keep an accurate internal track of which IP addresses are being used by which computers within their systems. While the newspaper can only go so far as to identify the IP addresses used to make the offensive comments on the Hillsborough page, the networking experts who run government systems can go further.
Many routers, proxy servers and firewalls do keep a log of all traffic entering and exiting the network. Knowing the date, time and IP address, makes our job considerably easier when commencing our detailed search. Assuming that the network experts do keep accurate system logs of who does what on their system, it will only be a matter of time before they track a login to a computer that made the Wikipedia entry on the specific date and time. While they may need to gather other forensic evidence to prove or disprove who was on the computer in question, the case against users will be pretty strong.
Andrew Smith does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations. It's the "wisdom of crowds" principle in action. Writers are encouraged to back up factual statements with verifiable references and authoritative sources as often as possible. Wikipedia has rules - lots of rules. One obvious one is not being dishonest.
Another is avoiding opinion and sticking to verifiable facts. But it is possible to set up a user account with a pseudonymous username to allow you to edit anonymously. However, using anonymous accounts for blatant misrepresentation and puffery - known as sock puppetry - is often spotted and the offending content challenged or removed by other editors.
Blatant self-promotion is frowned upon by the community and viewed as a conflict of interest. Anyway, as you don't control the page, less flattering information may soon be added by others. But examples of Wikispam, as it's sometimes called, are "speedily deleted" according to the website. You don't need to log in to the site to read or edit articles, but setting up an account and registering allows you to create your own pages, upload content and edit without your internet protocol IP address - the number that identifies a mobile phone or computer on a network - being visible to the public.
The Wiki administrators, who number around 1,, can usually identify the IP address of someone editing articles and this can be tracked to a rough location, enabling them to spot suspicious patterns of behaviour. Offending accounts can be suspended, without individuals necessarily being identified. If the IP address is different - you use a different computer or phone than the one you used before and, if you're being really sneaky, move location to do your editing - there's no reason why you can't set up another anonymous account and carry on as before.
And there are plenty of services allowing internet users to hide their IP addresses anyway, for example, by using an encrypted virtual private network. Someone going to great lengths to hide their IP address is sometimes enough to arouse suspicion among the site's administrators.
And patterns of behaviour - from the adoption of similar usernames to a focus on specific topics and types of edit - can reveal a lot about motivations and personality. Multiple accounts can often be tracked to one individual - we're never as anonymous as we like to believe. But any open and collaborative system will always be open to abuse.
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