WIKIPEDIA SLEUTHS WIN JOURNALISM AWARD FOR WIRED.COM
By Ryan Singel

Wired News
a-sleut.html
Sept 10 2008

Wired.com’s Threat Level blog won the 2008 Knight-Batten Award for
Innovation in Journalism on Wednesday for finding a way to let you
readers highlight the worst whitewashing of Wikipedia entries by
corporations and governments.

Threat Level accepted the $10,000 award for editor Kevin Poulsen’s
post that combined a voting widget and internet superstar Virgil
Griffith’s WikiScanner application that let you readers find and
highlight the worst self-interested anonymous edits to Wikipedia
entries. The judges found that the tool "finally inserts an air of
accountability to those who edit the site to fit their own agendas."

Readers used Griffith’s clever WikiScanner to check the anonymous edits
made from internet space assigned to a specific company or government
agency. They then submitted the damning finds to a Reddit-powered
voting widget for others to verify and vote up or down.

Some of the top whitewashes spotted by you citizen journalists?

Dow Chemical removing an entire section that included discussion of
the Bhopal disaster, silicon breast implant problems and Agent Orange,
for one.

Controversial voting machine maker Diebold deleted criticism of
its electronic voting machines, while someone inside the Turkish
government removed a reference to the Armenian genocide. Then there
was the anonymou Exxon employee decided to make the Valdez oil spill
disaster entry less damning — and the FBI employee who took down an
aerial photo of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Of course, you readers should have gotten the award for finding,
submitting and rating the spin jobs — a really fine bit of citizen
journalism that we are proud to have a small part in sparking.

But being privacy-respecting folks, we don’t know who you are and
will just have to accept the award on your behalf.

Knight-Batten also awarded $2,000 special distinction awards to
Politifact.com and Ushahidi.

Congressional Quarterly and the St. Petersburg Times collaborated
on Politifact.com, which rates campaign statement’s accuracy and
highlights false statements by candidates.

Kenyan techies launched Ushahidi, a site that mapped incidents of
political violence ahead of the country’s presidential election using
accounts texted to the site by bloggers and citizen journalists.

Jacquelin Dupree won a $2,000 Citizen Media award for her one-woman
chronicle of the changes to Washington D.C.’s Southeast/Ballpark
district, Her site combines interactive maps and before-and-after
photos, which the judges described as "an incredible wealth of
information, especially impressive for a one-person effort."

Threat Level is thrilled to have won and is honored by the good
company of the other finalists. And of course, deepest thanks to all
you anonymous citizen sleuths.

A full list of the finalists and runners up can be found here.