Wikinews.org debuted a new kind of investigative journalism in a report on the Senate Wikipedia scandal. That story hit the mainstream media last week when several outlets reported that staff members at several senators’ offices had apparently edited entries about their senators and rival politicians that deleted or added embarrassing information.

Wikinews volunteer reporters took an innovative approach to furthering this story. They dug up IP addresses at individual senators’ offices and then analyzed the Wikipedia history pages for the affected senators’ biographies to identify which offices manipulated which entries. What was particularly ingenious, I thought, was how the reporters mapped IP addresses to senate offices. They sent e-mail to the senators and then looked at the headers in the replies received from the auto-responders to identify which offices had which addresses. Then they compared those addresses to the ones tracked on the history page. Very innovative and very revealing.