Techfun

The Associated Press: AP Journalists Sue Arkansas Officials:

AP Journalists Sue Arkansas Officials 17 hours ago LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Two Associated Press journalists sued Arkansas officials Friday for allegedly violating the state’s Freedom of Information Act by withholding information about which government computers were used to edit entries on Wikipedia.

AP Arkansas News Editor Kelly P. Kissel and reporter Jon Gambrell filed the lawsuit in Pulaski County Circuit Court against Gov. Mike Beebe, Attorney General Dustin McDaniel and officials with the state’s Department of Information Systems.

The lawsuit asks the court to order state officials to reveal the physical locations of five computers that were used while editing information about politicians on the popular online encyclopedia that allows anyone to submit or make changes to articles.

Virgil Griffith’s WikiScanner was all over the news back in early August this year. His web application, WikiScanner, lets visitors to the site scan the editing history of Wikipedia articles and track back the editors by IP address. There are several interesting “prefab” queries in place where you can see edits made from Democrat or Republican headquarters or various other institutions. The lawsuit mentioned above is the first I have heard of in which a news organization has filed suit to dig deeper in order to discover exactly which computers were used to edit articles.

The articles in question are ones about former governor Mike Huckabee in which information about a controversial pardon was removed along with information about his frequent use of a state owned aircraft.