Wikiscanning Japan

I seem to be coming late to the party, but the amazing Wikiscanner has started to take its toll on the Japanese-language Internet thanks to a nice Japanese version of the site:

– Yomiuri reports that Wikiscanner has found that among other things the health labor and welfare ministry and the education ministry have edited articles on themselves and Diet member Nagatsuma (claiming he exploits his stance to make money on the national pension scandal). The rest of the article explains the concept of an IP address for anyone who is smart enough to make it into the government but dumb enough not to know that people can tell what you do online.

– Kikko uses the emergence of this tool to make a rant and rave over the inaccuracies in her own entry, but makes the following commentary on the Yomiuri article:

So to sum up, looking at this web news article, I was angry to see that the MIC edited the “electronic voting” article to make the government look good, that the education ministry deleted a passage about the scandal surrounding former Tax Commission Chairman Masaaki Honma, or that the health labor and welfare ministry wrote bad things about DPJ Diet member Akira Nagatsuma, but it made sense just because that’s what they would do. What puzzled me was why someone in the agriculture ministry made a massive amount of edits to the entry on Gundam. We can tell it was accessed during work hours because of the MAFF IP address, but it has zero to do with government administration and could only have come from a Gundam maniac. And this guy is using the people’s tax money to play around on the Internet! So maybe we should find out his name and write a Wikipedia entry saying “He is a ridiculous civil servant who accesses Wikipedia from MAFF computers during work hours and plays around with the Japanese people’s tax money.” (lol)

– JCAST notes that NHK has been making lots and lots of edits to a wide range of subjects and whines that they are wasting too much time editing Wikipedia for “personal” use.

So with all the buzz, I thought I would take a stab at seeing what sort of edits Japanese IPs have been making. Feel free to try at home!

– Mainichi Shimbun – In the English Wikipedia, Mainichi has edited the post on “MOTTAINAI” a term it has been promoting (in the face of much MF skepticism). This only deepens my suspicions at the cynical Japanese media-government collusion attempting to turn this word into some kind of soft-power buzz word.

– People at LDP headquarters are fans of rakugo and J-Pop singer Minako Honda (“Japan’s Madonna”), ego-Wiki, and delete a mention of the involvement with the LDP of someone in the Nagasaki local TV for reasons I can’t possibly understand.

… Someone at Dentsu changed the height of an actress by one centimeter. That is the attention to detail that keeps these guys on top.

… A second look shows almost 300 edits from Dentsu. A rundown:

A line was added to the entry for Calbee (a potato chip company) on the new president/CEO Yasuo Nakata. Previous: “He is the first head of the company from outside the founding [Matsuo] family.” Now after that, “However, Nakata is well-known in the IT industry as a CIO. He also serves as an external director of Autobacs, a car part retailer listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.”

They added this to the entry for Kirin Beverages: “Starting in Feb 2006, the company started a new Internet shopping business “markers” an experiment with Internet business including selling items other than beverages.” Oh, I wonder whose idea that was?

Lots of minor adjustments to musicians’ discographies, etc.

Multiple edits to the ‘list of fictional diseases’

More possible ego-editing to the page for “media creator” and former Dentsu-man Masahiko Sato

Special attention paid to the AIDMAS “Attention / Interest / Desire / Memory / Action / Share” theory of Internet marketing

…and a bunch of edits to pages for people that I’ve never heard of…

OK, we can do this TPMuckraker style. Search the site and tell us what you find! Things I want to look at at some point: Johnny’s, Yoshimoto Kogyo, Scientology, Soka Gakkai, other media institutions (Nikkei, Asahi, Sankei to name a few) and on and on… I am sure 2ch has it all in there somewhere.