Twitter bot that tweets Wikipedia edits made from IP addresses of Congress | Hacker News Reader

Twitter bot that tweets Wikipedia edits made from IP addresses of Congress

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128 pointsfrostmatthew20 comments

This feels like christmas morning.

And because it's wikipedia, we can harvest this data all the way back in time!

Ohai! PirateParty dude here. Can we copy the code so that we can easily monitor other parliaments and senates around the world ?

According to https://twitter.com/parliamentedits, it looks like the source is here - https://github.com/edsu/anon

Have fun :)

Some of these are pretty funny

https://twitter.com/congressedits/status/487338666357174272

which links to

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616433636&oldid=614...

I think there is a logical continuation. There are plenty of IP addresses owned by private companies that have mentions in wikipedia. Link changes done from those IP ranges with edits of articles that mention entity IP ranges belong to. Why stop at Congress when we can have similar data sets for Google, BP, Yahoo, Apple, etc.

Nice one: https://twitter.com/congressedits/status/486895711402070016

I like this one, personally: https://twitter.com/congressedits/status/487338666357174272

What about other countries (Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Singapore, China, India) or organizations (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, Tata, Baidu, So, Pfizer)? Is there generic platform where information about IP ranges can be entered? Or are this 'one off' projects? Why not to make generic solution?

If you can identify the IP ranges you can configure anon https://github.com/edsu/anon to listen for edits from them, and announce them using a particular Twitter account.

Honestly, I just put anon together in a few hours, and didn't put a great deal of thought into it. It might make sense to do what you suggest, and create a more generic webapp to deploy on Wikimedia labs, which manages the IP ranges, and Twitter accounts to post to.

Not sure what the benefit is. As LTE-enabled tablets and personal hotspots proliferate, it will be very easy to cover-up who made the anonymous edits.

What would really be interesting are edits made from known Tor endpoints.

Its not about who exactly made edits imo, more like from which circle it came from. It is interesting to see which edits folks from congress make. Same would be with presidential and pentagon circles.

Tor endpoints are forbidden from making anonymous edits to Wikipedia.

Lots of proxy servers (mine included) are banned as well.

Just launched @PakistanEdits Unfortunately IP addresses of Govt. owned institutes are not available but its fun to see what is being edited from the whole country :-)

I've just used the open source code to make one for the Australian Parliament, @AussieParlEdits

It'd also be interesting to see what IPs from the FCC and NSA's ranges edit.

It'd be brilliant if there was something similar for UK politicians.

There is!

https://twitter.com/parliamentedits

Nothing tweeted yet except mention of the US Congress one, corresponding accounts also for Canada and Sweden and a mention of IFTTT and code at https://github.com/edsu/anon

There is, although it's a lot quieter:

https://twitter.com/parliamentedits

(linked from the first tweet by @congressedits)

This is genius.

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