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Scanning for Lawyers on Wikiscanner
Someone in the Texas office of BCG Attorney Search likes to play pranks with Wikipedia entries about musician Prince, while someone at a Nashville law firm wants the world to know that law professor and blogger Ann Althouse has an "aversion to the acknowledgment of her own conservatism." These were some of the edits to Wikipedia entries that originated from law-related IP addresses, as revealed by the endlessly fascinating new tool Wikiscanner.
Yesterday at my blog LawSites, I put Wikiscanner to work exploring law-related IP addresses. My colleague Carolyn Elefant wrote about Wikiscanner here on Aug. 20, picking up on Dave Hoffman's post at Concurring Opinions in which he found large law firms editing Wikipedia "to burnish their reputations and trash their competitors." I decided to branch out from large firms and see what else I could find. In addition to the two mentioned above, I found several of interest, including:
- Some 180 edits from the New York Attorney General's office, including two to former AG Eliot Spitzer's biography while he was campaigning for governor along with edits to topics ranging from Kerry Kennedy to Roger Clemens to Elvis.
- At least 175 edits from the domain of legal publishing company ALM (parent of Law.com), including a series in which an apparently disgruntled employee revised the company's entry to criticize its holiday-bonus policy and someone else (presumably) deleted the revision.
The edits that came out of BCG Attorney Search show that someone there is no fan of Prince. The person twice deleted the entire entry about Prince's album "Musicology" and replaced it with the single word, "poopie." For the Prince film "Graffiti Bridge," the person replaced the entire entry with "stinky."
I have more on this here.
Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on September 6, 2007 at 05:54 PM | Permalink
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