Caveat Rector: Wannabe President Beware--You Will Be Found Out!

Since a friend pointed me to the story of WikiScanner early last week, I've been reminded of my previous post of helping politicians technologically: If you've done something stupid, it will catch up to you. And so caveat rector, literally, ruler beware, but this will apply more to the wannabe rulers out there. Add WikiScanner as an additional nightmare for politicians and their PR people, along with current nightmares of YouTube and Viral Videos.

What kind of information will Wikiscanner divulge about Wiki entries? Will we learn that Hilary's camp was "correcting" Obama's name to Osama? Will we discover that Rudy Giuliani has edited the postings on transgender information? It's a brave new world, isn't it?

What Virgil Griffith has done is not in fact new: most IT people and otherwise technologically-capable Internauts knew that you could Whois an IP or DNS fairly easily. But Griffith has just democratized a little slice of the Web, and particularly, the already democratic Wikipedia. Now, not only can more people look at this little-used information, but it will be easier to read and compile for everybody, and it will allow various other Web mash-ups to take this information and create even more useful links: like anyone who made a Wikipedia edit and to whom they've contributed money (WikiScanner + OpenSecrets.org?).

Since the news broke, we've learned that the CIA doesn't have anything better to do than to troll Wikipedia and occasionally make edits; that Diebold employees helped out their CEO with some revisionist history; and that a South African government worker apparently believes that HIV/AIDS is not a problem in his country.

I have a feeling that as people start using WikiScanner, that we will be hearing about a lot of different conflicts of interest, slander, etc.