Decius wrote:

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  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."

Congrats on the one hand, but something seems wrong about Wired getting $10,000 for this blog post and Virgil getting nothing for writing the actual tool.

Who/where do we write letters to? It's all nice and well to call him an "Internet Superstar" but money talks.

Hijexx wrote:

Decius wrote:

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  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."

Congrats on the one hand, but something seems wrong about Wired getting $10,000 for this blog post and Virgil getting nothing for writing the actual tool.

Who/where do we write letters to? It's all nice and well to call him an "Internet Superstar" but money talks.

The first poster in the thread said something. I don't feel like I'm objective here as I know him. Certainly, the award highlights the way wired presented the material, as an interactive experience for their readers rather than what the news media usually does - simply talk about it, but the whole idea was virgil's, really, and its hard to separate that. Why wasn't one of numerous other stories in which wired incorporated this voting technology selected instead of this one? Well, the idea of many people using the tool to discover politically motivated edits, which was virgil's idea.