Wikiscanner
In order to get some experience using a new media tool, I experimented with the Wikiscanner a bit.
Ofcourse I had to see the changes made by Mabel Wisse Smit for myself. I figured it would be a bit unclear, but I was quite amazed by the fact that it actually said ‘Koninklijk Paleis Huis Ten Bosch’ .[1]
And ofcourse the changes made by Shell were really funny as well. Changing their position from ‘a major British-Dutch [[energy]] company’ to ‘the best [[energy]] company in the world’ .[2]
Expecting to do an amazing discovery myself I scanned every potentially controversial person, company and organization. After scanning for a couple of hours I was pretty disappointed to not do a great discovery myself. If I was famous enough to have my own Wikipedia-page I guess I would definitely have edited it myself.
However I was quite surprised at the amount of information available connecting the ‘virtual’ to the ‘real’ world. Trying to connect anonymous IP-adresses to a real life adress myself I used the Whois for the first time. Whois is: ‘a TCP-based query/response protocol which is widely used for querying a database in order to determine the owner of a domain name, an IP address, or an autonomous system number on the Internet.’ [3]
It was really amazing to see how much information is available online. I guess most people aren’t aware of the fact that all the information is going to be freely available when they fill in the form to request a domainname.
I tried a couple of URL’s on the dutch ‘Stichting Internet Domeinregistratie Nederland (SIDN)’ www.sidn.nl of websites owned by friends of mine, and discovered there was more personal information to be found there than in the Dutch online version of the phonebook and the Yellow Pages put together: home address, mobile phone number and e-mail.
Despite the fact that I didn’t find anything shocking using the Wikiscanner, it turned out to be quite a revelation anyway.
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[1]http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/f.php?pagetitle=Princess+Mabel+of+Orange-Nassau
[2]http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/f.php?pagetitle=Royal+Dutch+Shell
[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHOIS
