Wired.com's Threat Level blog won the 2008 Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism on Wednesday for finding a way to let you readers highlight the worst whitewashing of Wikipedia entries by corporations and governments.
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."
Readers used Griffith's clever WikiScanner to check the anonymous edits made from internet space assigned to a specific company or government agency. They then submitted the damning finds to a Reddit-powered voting widget for others to verify and vote up or down.
Some of the top whitewashes spotted by you citizen journalists?
Dow Chemical removing an entire section that included discussion of the Bhopal disaster, silicon breast implant problems and Agent Orange, for one.
Controversial voting machine maker Diebold deleted criticism of its electronic voting machines, while someone inside the Turkish government removed a reference to the Armenian genocide. Then there was the anonymous Exxon employee decided to make the Valdez oil spill disaster entry less damning – and the FBI employee who took down an aerial photo of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
Of course, you readers should have gotten the award for finding, submitting and rating the spin jobs – a really fine bit of citizen journalism that we are proud to have a small part in sparking.
But being privacy-respecting folks, we don't know who you are and will just have to accept the award on your behalf.
Knight-Batten also awarded $2,000 special distinction awards to Politifact.com and Ushahidi.
Congressional Quarterly and the St. Petersburg Times collaborated on Politifact.com, which rates campaign statement's accuracy and highlights false statements by candidates.
Kenyan techies launched Ushahidi, a site that mapped incidents of political violence ahead of the country's presidential election using accounts texted to the site by bloggers and citizen journalists.
Jacquelin Dupree won a $2,000 Citizen Media award for her one-woman chronicle of the changes to Washington D.C.'s Southeast/Ballpark district. Her site combines interactive maps and before-and-after photos, which the judges described as "an incredible wealth of information, especially impressive for a one-person effort."
Threat Level is thrilled to have won and is honored by the good company of the other finalists. And of course, deepest thanks to all you anonymous citizen sleuths.
A full list of the finalists and runners-up can be found here.
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