Thursday, March 27, 2008

Metal Inquisition Investigative Report - WikiScanner



Late last year Wired magazine published a list of "salacious edits" to Wikipedia, including the Church Of Scientology deleting criticism from its Wikipedia entry, the FBI editing a page regarding Guantanamo, and even the Republican Party changing the entry about the Iraq war. How were such changes detected? Through the magic of WikiScanner, a site developed by a Cal Tech grad student that tracks IP addresses of those who make changes to Wikipedia pages.

Why am I telling you all this? Because everyone here at Metal Inquisition is committed to transparency and truth. Though we were unable to track if Mike Browning himself was the one that deleted the specs of the Nocturnus time machine that were posted on Wikipedia, or who on earth deleted the detailed (and scholarly) definition of Wigger Slam to the Death Metal page. We were able, however, to find changes from rather unusual sources to some pages that are probably of interest to our readers. We've included screenshots as proof, but feel free to follow the links as well.

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Someone at the Tennessee Department Of Education cares about Broken Hope? Perhaps they too were confused by the fact that the intro in Swamped In Gore is called "Borivojs Demise". Who names an intro after a Metal Maniacs demo reviewer?


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The Catholic Diocese of Phoenix thinks it's important that the facts about Suicidal Tendencies on Wikipedia are right? Are they mad about the song "Send Me Your Money"? Is that song also the reason why the Social Security Administration is tooling around with the ST page?




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Someone at Harvard University is making changes to the Wikipedia entry for "wigger"? Must be some head researcher who is way into Devourment.


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Harvard's at it again folks. My theory is that a leading anthropologist at Harvard began to study upstate New York douchebag culture, and in order to understand it better, he immersed himself in the culture. Anthropologists call this "participant observation", and one particular issue with this type of research is that the anthropologist can begin to identify with the culture he's studying. Think of it as Stockholm Syndrome. Anyway, this guy starts going to Manowar shows, he writes a few papers...next thing you know, he's wearing fur chaps, and making angry edits to their Wikipedia page. All to make sure the member timelines are correct. This sort of thing happens all the time in academia


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Can you find other suspicious Wikipedia edits? Let us know about them. Give it a try here. Perhaps you'll discover a mass conspiracy to try to cover up Wild Rags' early glam releases. Who knows.

4 comments:

  1. Impressive, fun, and scary all at once...

    And GREAT post, as always, ha...

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  2. The Catholic Diocese of Phoenix... that one is just weird...

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  3. i can only assume there is a great deal of scholarly activity around wigger slam right now. that would explain a lot of it. but broken hope?! yuck!

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  4. The Harvard account probably belongs to that douchebag from Metal Archives. Ultra Boris?

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