Who’s Editing What on Wikipedia
Wired has an article on Wikipedia Scanner you should read and distribute to your teachers.
It’s a searchable database of changes made to Wikipedia matched to IP address from which those changes were made, showing that people at Walmart, Diebold, the CIA, Microsoft, members of Congress and many others have been whitewashing their Wikipedia entries (I hope no one is surprised).
Not only is this a great thing to discuss with students when teaching about transparency & legitimacy on Wikipedia, but it’s a great example of someone harnessing publicly available databases to create a super new tool. Very Cool!
There’s also this post on Resource Shelf about a new color-coding system for Wikipedia entries. I’m not sure how well this will work, but it’s an interesting idea.