Justin Blinder

Wikipedia Was Here reveals the location and geographical context of anonymous edits to specific Wikipedia entries, as they occur in real-time. The site geocodes the IP addresses of new Wikipedia edits and shows corresponding visual imagery on Google Maps and Google Street View. 

Wikipedia entries are, on the surface, facially neutral. But in the name of crowdsourcing and “truth,” certain edits aggregate over time to semantically erase and reshape important popular narratives. Further, anonymous edits obfuscate context, authorship, and power, often marginalizing voices from minority communities. 

When are anonymous editors leaking crucial facts? Drawing upon local knowledge? Making assertions without evidence? In a “post-truth” era, Wikipedia Was Here aims to make the production of popular knowledge—and the underlying power relations—more visible, helping us to visualize the cultural and infrastructural architectural contexts, and perhaps even a hint of the political climate, in which entries are edited and rewritten.

In March 2018, YouTube announced that it would add information from Wikipedia to videos about conspiracies. Given how Wikipedia entries can be anonymously manipulated, this project also questions whether such moves are sufficient in combating fake news. 
(View the project: https://wikihere.justin.work/)

Notes:
Google Street View locations shown are approximate. Most IP addresses associated with anonymous edits are accurate. 

When editing a Wikipedia article anonymously (without an account) the editor's IP address is used as their username. According to Wikipedia, VPN's and Tor are mostly blocked when anonymously editing articles.

From Wikipedia:
"Editing Wikipedia with an IP address as your identifier is often less anonymous than editing with a normal account.... Note that editing Wikipedia through Virtual Private Networks anonymizing proxy servers or Tor is, at a minimum, controversial, and users editing via these proxies are most of the time blocked from editing, until you disconnect from anonymity networks due to problems of vandalism on anonymous networks such as tor, proxies, and VPNs."
More information about anonymous Wikipedia edits and IP addresses can be found here. IP address geolocation is performed using Maxmind.

Year: 2017

Press:
Fast Company

Exhibitions:
Believe the Hype, B4BEL4B Gallery | Oakland, CA
Uproot, SmackMellon | Brooklyn, NY