August 15th, 2007
Vonage edits Wikipedia entry, tool indicates
By now you may have heard of Wikipedia Scanner, a hot new Web-based tool that tracks changes to Wikipedia entries made by individual IP addresses.
The interesting thing about this tool is that when these entry changes are traced back to the IP address of an individual company, organization or institution, we can then dig further to see just what the changes were.
Because we talk a lot about VoIP around here, I thought I would hunt around for what I might find for IP addresses associated with Vonage.
Although Wikipedia changes launched from Vonage IP addresses don’t have to be about Vonage, several of them are. Take for instance, the screen grab at the top of this post from a Wikipedia Scanner search results page that points to a change in the Vonage Wikipedia entry about the patent dustup with Verizon.
More of an update than an edit, the latest version can be found here.
What’s even more interesting is the correction of information that could be considered as having a negative connotation to Vonage.
For example, this link from Wikipedia Scanner to Wikipedia documents a presumed Vonage edit of a page concerning Vonage’s number portability policies.
The old text read in part:
Vonage refuses to transfer subscriber numbers to other companies.
Text was corrected to read: Vonage will transfer subscriber numbers to other companies.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
