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Bot Tweets Anonymous Wikipedia Edits From Capitol Hill

Posted by samzenpus on from the noting-the-changes dept.

mpicpp writes about a new Twitter bot that reports all of the anonymous Wikipedia edits being made from the US Senate and House of Representatives. Ed Summers, an open source Web developer, recently saw a friend tweet about Parliament WikiEdits, a UK Twitter "bot" that watched for anonymous Wikipedia edits coming from within the British Parliament's internal networks. Summers was immediately inspired to do the same thing for the US Congress. "The simplicity of combining Wikipedia and Twitter in this way immediately struck me as a potentially useful transparency tool," Summers wrote in his personal blog. "So using my experience on a previous side project [Wikistream, a Web application that watches Wikipedia editing activity], I quickly put together a short program that listens to all major language Wikipedias for anonymous edits from Congressional IP address ranges and tweets them." The stream for the bot, @congressedits, went live a day later, and it now provides real-time tweets when anonymous edits of Wikipedia pages are made. Summers also posted the code to GitHub so that others interested in creating similar Twitter bots can riff on his work.

19 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. In a week it'll need to be updated to @toredits by Assmasher · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...for when they start anonymizing... ;)

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    1. Re:In a week it'll need to be updated to @toredits by plaukas+pyragely · · Score: 4, Funny

      That's even better! Imagine the headache for NSA staff if TOR becomes popular in congress.

    2. Re:In a week it'll need to be updated to @toredits by Bobakitoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The point is that they wont be able to argue that TOR is a paedophile/terrorist tool and use that as a 'probable cause' to harasses and torture citizens.

    3. Re:In a week it'll need to be updated to @toredits by daremonai · · Score: 5, Funny

      If congressmen are using it, doesn't that only strengthen the argument that "TOR is a paedophile/terrorist tool"?

  2. GitHub link by worf_mo · · Score: 4, Informative

    In case you don't want to wade through the article, the source code is at https://github.com/edsu/anon

  3. Also available for UK, Canada, France ... by Andreas+Kolbe · · Score: 5, Informative

    @parliamentedits, @wikiAssemblee, @gccaedits and @RiksdagWikiEdit Twitter accounts have been the set up to do the same for the UK, France, Canada and Sweden.

    One thing to remember here is that most of these edits are probably made by junior IT staff rather than elected representatives (recall the recent Hillsborough case in the UK).

    1. Re:Also available for UK, Canada, France ... by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      One thing to remember here is that most of these edits are probably made by junior IT staff

      It doesn't matter who makes them, the only thing that matters is the reason.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:Also available for UK, Canada, France ... by SpzToid · · Score: 2

      The few that I checked out, were all clarifying legitimate typos. This is an excellent tool, to be able to monitor such, with precision like this. If only we could get this tool into OpenSSL or some derivative of OpenSSL, etc., somehow.

      FWIW, this is the first useful thing I've personally seen Twitter used for. But like everything I see in Twitter, there is redundancy in plained old, un-walled-garden rss publishing, (with no 140K limit!)

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      You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
    3. Re:Also available for UK, Canada, France ... by Guppy06 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      One thing to remember here is that most of these edits are probably made by junior IT staff rather than elected representatives

      I can't speak for the others you've listed, but these Capitol Hill edits almost exclusively affect articles on sitting members and those on politically contentious topics. If it really is by "junior IT staff," then it's more likely that they're doing it under orders from their higher-ups rather than wasting office hours on topics they're personally interested in.

  4. Work from home. by KarlH420 · · Score: 5, Funny

    In other news congressional interns are now encouraged to work from home and on their mobile devices.

  5. Re:Not really new by oobayly · · Score: 2

    Yeah, but there was no citation, so the piece was reverted.

  6. Re:External Firms by matbury · · Score: 2

    That's easy enough to do: create an account on Wikipedia.org and "watch" those pages.

  7. Actually, the edits look good! by MobyDisk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I started browsing it looking for anything juicy. The edits seem to be small, good quality, mostly political edits. They look like interns with an interest in politics, history, and dance movies. I'd love to have an app like this for my employer's corporate network, just to see what people here do (if anything).

    Here are the changes I've seen thus far:
    lawyer --> attorney
    remove "cold war" from some 18th century guy
    change someone from democrat to independent
    however --> then
    $ --> dollars
    Jiang Jiemin --> Zhou Jiping
    [[ --> ]]

    1. Re:Actually, the edits look good! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Competent edits? Not on my watch! [revert]

    2. Re:Actually, the edits look good! by cultiv8 · · Score: 4, Insightful
      And then there's this edit added to Lyndon LaRouche's page:

      He is also a disinformation agent funded by the Kremlin.

      Source

      --
      sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
    3. Re:Actually, the edits look good! by Binestar · · Score: 3, Informative

      I agree in principle, but you missed the context and a bit on completeness on the lawyer -> attorney edit.

      It was actually "Corporate Lawyer" -> "Attorney", which has a different feel to it.

      --
      Do you Gentoo!?
    4. Re:Actually, the edits look good! by Andreas+Kolbe · · Score: 2

      Sounds a bit like Pending Changes (installed on the German, Polish and some other Wikipedias, but not on the English one). This requires all IP edits to be approved by a "trusted" editor. Not a perfect system, but better than what is in place now.

  8. Re:Some hilarity by RyuuzakiTetsuya · · Score: 2

    My favorite one is the most recent:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...

    Here comes the conspiracy theorists...

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    Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
  9. Re:"Anonymous" is not anonymous at all by Andreas+Kolbe · · Score: 2

    Correct, though note that checkusers are not staff members but unpaid volunteers. The Wikimedia Foundation doesn't even necessarily know who they are.