Twenty-four year old researcher Virgil Griffith has developed a database that traces the IP addresses of anonymous contributors to Wikipedia, the free online, user-written encyclopedia.

Among his reasons for doing so were the desire "to create a cornucopia of minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike" and the fact that "every time I hear about a new security vulnerability, I look to see if it can be done on a massive scale and indexed."

With his WikiScanner, Griffith was able to find several cases where unfavorable information was anonymously deleted from the entries of certain corporations; he was able to trace the digital footprint left by these anonymous users to IP addresses reserved for those very corporations.

Links:
WikiScanner
"See Who's Editing Wikipedia--Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign" (Wired)
Wikidgame—reader-contributed list of the most "shameful" Wikipedia edits

Photo of Virgil Griffith by Jake Appelbaum.