I am going to file this under, “the Internet is a strange and beautiful world.” Virgil Griffith has recently finished a mashup that links the IP address’ of organizations to Wikipedia edits that they have made. There is a lot of information to explore, so here are a few amusing facts that we learned from our initial dive.

U.S. House Of Representatives

IP address’ found to be originating from the U.S. House of Representatives seem to spend an inordinate amount of time editing articles on Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual people.

Take a look here for one of their multitude of edits, and follow the bouncing link to see the pattern.

Diebold

Diebold, a company that has recently been in the news for making voting machines that were at best, faulty, took it upon themselves to remove all instances of criticism from their Wikipedia page. Take a look at the Threat Level article for more items of interest to Diebold.

Political Parties

All I am going to say about the edits that someone at the Democratic Party made to Rush Limbaugh’s Wikipedia page is that “jerkoff” probably fails the Wikipedia objectivity test. Over in the Republican’s camp, they seem really interested in adding flag icons to Academy Award winner directors, and twiddling with Walt Whitman’s page.

Wal*Mart

Finally, Wal*Mart’s biggest interest is, not surprisingly, Wal*Mart. Coming in a close second, however, is their desire to produce the most accurate listing of video games on the planet. In a not too distant third, a distaste for Ann Coulter.

Web 2.0 Roundup

There is so much more you can learn from this mashup, but I warn you it is addicting. Tell me what your favorite discovery was, and where you found, it in the comments.

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