Anonymous Wikipedia edits from the Norwegian parliament and government offices | Hacker News Reader

Anonymous Wikipedia edits from the Norwegian parliament and government offices

files.jaribakken.no

96 pointsjensen2k35 comments

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Better to just link to the tool: https://github.com/edsu/anon.

- Denmark (https://twitter.com/FTingetWikiEdit)

- Sweden (https://twitter.com/RiksdagWikiEdit)

- United States (https://twitter.com/congressedits)

- Chile (https://twitter.com/CongresoEdita)

- United Kingdom (https://twitter.com/parliamentedits)

- France (https://twitter.com/wikiAssemblee)

- Canada (https://twitter.com/gccaedits)

Local government:

- North Carolina (https://twitter.com/NCGAedits)

(To those wondering, no interesting edits so far.)

Nice. They should probably modify the tool so that the links go to the https version, not the http version.

Sounds like a great thing to submit a pull request for.

If anyone wants to try this historically for an arbitrary IP block, Google's BigQuery has a snapshot of English Wikipedia edits from April 2010: https://developers.google.com/bigquery/docs/dataset-wikipedi...

Here's an example query: https://gist.github.com/jarib/c16345c19971e324ac82

Please star this issue to bring the snapshot up to date: https://code.google.com/p/google-bigquery/issues/detail?id=1...

- Australia (https://twitter.com/AussieParlEdits)

- South Africa (https://twitter.com/parlizaedits)

- Germany (https://twitter.com/reichstagedits)

Interesting data, but I fail to see anything sinister going on here. Skimming through the list, it looks like 90% of the articles fall into one of three categories: Streets in Oslo, embassies in Oslo and people I mostly haven't heard of (i.e. not politically controversial characters). I don't see any edits intended to sway public opinion.

Same here, my only worry is that maybe that's exactly the strategy they use to blur the waters. On the other hand, propaganda can't be that forward, can it?

"Muddy the waters"? I think lines, not water, are blurred :)

It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to understand what was meant : )

"Rocket engineer"? I think surgeons work on bodies, not rockets :)

I think the point of the post was, look at how you can see this government's edits, why can't we see every governments edits?

It's phrased like this is some big evil scheme going on but looking at the edits it's exactly the kind of stuff I believe the government should keep up to date on Wikipedia.

seemed to me like it was explicitly phrased so you WOULDN'T think that.

imagine the title (and source) if they were making controversial edits?

I think he's bothered by the vaguely sinister use of "anonymous". It's a true adjective, of course, but not really worth including in the title unless you're trying to imply something bad (and get page views).

it being vague is the reason i concluded it wasn't part of a big evil scheme.

if this was part of some "big evil scheme", the title would be far less innocent. do you disagree?

so to say it is "phrased like this is some big evil scheme" seems disingenuous. i try not to make assumptions, especially when it comes to headlines and "news".

Looking through the first 20 or so, all I can find are added links, cross-references and improved grammar. Someone's lunch pastime maybe :)

Right -- this is one of the few cases where I'd rather see a link to a blog post (providing some analysis of the raw data) rather than just the link to the data.

Government-IP updates can be either completely innocuous (someone's lunch break habit, or possible goofing off during working hours... in which case this might get someone in hot water), or seriously ominous, if "re-writing history" is someone's paid job.

The former case isn't news-worthy, is it?

I randomly scanned through the list and found the same thing, nothing suspicious.

If the government was really determined to change history, you would think they wouldn't be doing it from their own IP ranges...

The thing is we are conditioned to believe that anything the government does, especially anonymously, is necessarily bad.

From what I've seem on the list, this has been some kind of an effort to actually improve the arcticles, and update government related information, like embassy addresses and websites.

It looks like there is a bunch of responsible, well intentioned and helpful people in the government - at lealst in Norway.

Are you Norwegian? Because my understanding is that Scandinavians tend to be the most trusting of their governments and have the least corrupt and most transparent governments (perhaps excluding Iceland). It would strike me as odd to hear someone from Norway say they are conditioned to believe anything government does is necessarily bad.

No, I'm Brazilian, and I'm speaking of "we" as everyone else outside scandinavia.

I phrased like that because most of the comments here were highlighting the fact that they did not find anything sinister going on, just as it was implicit that if it comes from the government, it must be sinister.

I've been to Sweden and even if they are not particularly fond of their government, they do trust it ways of magnitude more than we - as in everyone else - generally do.

Why excluding Iceland all the sudden? Iceland and Denmark have traditionally been included in the Scandinavian "zomg bestest democracy!!" model.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchenware_Revolution

Speak for yourself, but I would certainly question any need the government would have to make Wikipedia edits anonymously.

>>> The thing is we are conditioned to believe that anything the government does, especially anonymously, is necessarily bad.

I definitely noticed this trend here, in HN. While it's popular and not surprising in general public (cheap joke sort of thing), it's quite disappointing here.

There's a Twitter feed of wikipedia edits that originate from the US Congress - https://twitter.com/congressedits

My favorite is the edit of a congressman's bio from saying he used to be a "corporate lawyer" to "attorney".

Wikipedia is getting very awkward - it is clear that some articles are 100% propaganda, while others appear to have honest insight into world events.

I guess it's good to break the habit of thinking that history (like AP US History) can be read in an "unfiltered" way, but without something like a comprehensive database of every single Wikipedia edit, with tools to help detect bias (example: CIA wants to edit an article) Wikipedia will become a victim in the information arms race.

In this particular case, I think statistics can reverse the obvious "tragedy of the commons" situation with Wikipedia.

For example: tools to help with associating edits / edit conspiracy / sockpuppet detection

What source of edits do you think would yield more interesting results?

This is one of those cases where the changed Title on HN misleads [1]. These aren't changes from the 'government' they are changes from 'parliament and government offices'. Occams Razor would suggest they are more likely to be staffers and the occasional Patsy Cline-loving MP, rather than cabinet policies being enacted.

[1] Title as I write is "10 years of anonymous Wikipedia edits from the Norwegian government"

That deliberately inflammatory wording also relies on the fact that some people hear “government” and immediately thinking of intelligence agencies or cynical political operators and ignore the fact that, particularly in well-reputed free countries like Norway with extremely low corruption rates, there are many government employees who feel a mandate for actual public service, and are doing non-trivial research & analysis, etc. to make sure that lawmakers and other parts of the government make the right decisions.

The kind of people you hire to do that sort of work are exactly the kind of people who are going to update Wikipedia when they see something wrong or incomplete — or possibly the person who might get a message if someone can't find the right info on Wikipedia.

The same thing is true for the vast majority of the Wikipedia edits attributed to the US Congress. Not only are most if not all of them written by staffers and other government employees who almost certainly not receiving any direction to make the edits, they're almost all innocuous spelling or grammar edits and a large portion of them aren't even on political pages.

I don't know if I'd attribute it to public service so much as boredom and personal hobbies, though. The headline, of course, is the same as in this case - that "the government" is making Wikipedia edits, with malicious implications - though there have at least been some cases of vandalism, probably by staffers.

public service might be too specific a term – it's really just a desire to share or correct something you know about. People on HN are used to thinking of e.g. http://xkcd.com/386/ as a tech geek thing but there are an awful lot of wonky types who feel that compulsion about other fields.

I thought so as well. Most of the changes to the articles seem to be spelling corrections, and such.

I'm sorry about that. That's on me. It was necessary to edit it to get below the 80 char limit for post titles.

All good - I suspected that was the reason.

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