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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.

4 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. 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).

  2. 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.

  3. 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
    [[ --> ]]

  4. 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"?