A launch event will take place in a few hours in Toronto. The WikiWash search tool is already available online.
From the CIR Blog:
The Center for Investigative Reporting, Google, The Working Group and Metro News are joining forces again! This time, we’re coming together to launch WikiWash, a free public tool that allows users to track and examine edits to Wikipedia in real time.
The goal of the project is to make political and corporate spin on Wikipedia more visible and discoverable and at the same time promote accountability and transparency through crowdsourcing.
Andrew Fifield From Canada’s Metro newspapers has posted this posted this brief tutorial about how to use WikiWash.
WikiWash will then provide you with a chronological list of edits made to that page, including the handle or IP address of the person behind it. Clicking on each edit’s summary will highlight the specific changes that were made — be it simply correcting a typo or something a little shadier.