Anon – Tweet about anonymous Wikipedia edits from particular IP address ranges | Hacker News Reader

Anon – Tweet about anonymous Wikipedia edits from particular IP address ranges

github.com

118 pointswodow41 comments

How interesting. For example, this one was recently linked via the Twitter account: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616585674&oldid=615...

Changing it from "corporate lawyer" to "attorney". I assume that someone believes the latter is more "on message" for the Congressman's campaign efforts.

I imagine most of these edits are similarly innocuous and subtle, but it's interesting to see what things the folks up in Washington think are worth having an intern update to help facilitate their plans.

Some of the edits are far less subtle: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616939061&oldid=614...

The addition sounds like something copy/pasted directly from a campaign flyer. The addition of titles (Congressman), the subjective language (unwavering), and lack of any citations makes it a pretty clear indicator of who edited it and for what purpose.

Edit: a quick googling shows that it in fact is copy/pasted directly from his personal site: http://www.huelskamp.org/meettim.html

Or things that some staffer was looking up anyway and changed it. Then again, there's something sinister about the minor style change to Step Up 3D's article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616433636&oldid=61...

Probably the anti-community center lobby trying to keep kids from learning to breakdance.

Not to take away from the OP, but I find the library that it depends on, the npm package "wikichanges", to be a little more interesting:

https://github.com/edsu/wikichanges

Wikichanges provides a thin wrapper around Wikipedia's API to get a stream of edits. Anon listens on the WikiChanges object and filters it for a specified range of IPs, and then uses the "twit" package to tweet. OK, neither of them are particularly complex, but that's kind of what makes them cool...a lot of interesting things can be done with simple hacks and piping.

A small change I would make is to remove "anonymously" as by definition, all of the detected changes come from anonymous users. A little tightening of the wordage, and the tweet can include maybe even the changelog message of the edit.

A late-summer project I have in mind is just to scour all the changes made by these IP addresses, since the beginning of time. It'd be interesting to see the rate of change or the trends in behavior over time...I expect if Anon gets a little more coverage, all staffers will take the 30 seconds it takes to make a new account to mask their IP addresses. But then again, I thought people would've figured that out years ago...

The npm package is by the same author as the OP, he just extracted it into a package for re-use, so, yeah!

It's a bit concerning that https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616915051&oldid=61... would be coming from someone in congress.

143.231.249.138 has a number of goofy edits, and also seems overly concerned with Lyndon LaRouche's page. User was blocked for vandalism in 2008, 2009, 2011, seems like vandalizing the Wiki is their hobby.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/143.231....

>That IP was blocked again today for 48 hours after serially vandalizing a congressperson's entry, a personal attack on an admin, etc. Since blocking, this edit to the IP's own talk page is clearly a declaration, perhaps less than constructive. Toddst1 21:34, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

>I don't know if it is a declaration, but it is lyrics to The Doors song "Light My Fire." KillerChihuahua 22:16, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

>Blocked again, for 55 hrs. KillerChihuahua 20:49, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

>I just blocked 143.231.249.138, an IP within the US House range, for 24 hours for disruptive editing: repeatedly removing negative yet sourced information from articles about Republican congressmen and refusing attempts to discuss. Daniel Case 14:16, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee/Not...

Even more disturbing was the edit from the US Senate which changed Edward Snowden's page to refer to him as a "traitor" instead of "dissident": http://boingboing.net/2013/08/06/us-senate-ip-address-linked...

I'm more concerned with Senators and Congresspeople saying that in public rather than minor staffers screwing around on Wikipedia.

If this kind of thing becomes popular, I expect editing activity will get pushed out to the home ISPs of officials and their staff.

They could alternately just create accounts, and continue to edit from work. Non-logged-in edits have IP addresses attached, but edits by logged-in users are pseudonymous; you wouldn't know if a user was editing from the Danish Parliament any more than you know whether I'm posting this HN comment right now from the Danish Parliament. The IPs are logged internally for a period of time, but those logs are available to only a small number of users (not even most administrators), who can only use them for a limited range of things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Checkuser

Or maybe they'll just use Tor. And then they'll defend Tor in Congress because they have a use for it. I think I'd be fine with that outcome.

Wikipedia blocks Tor.

More accurately, most Tor exit nodes are either IP blocked from editing or the exit node servers block Wikipedia editing themselves to prevent their IP from incurring a block.

A common VPN would work just as well.

Bringing work home has not been a popular option in these spheres as far as I know, so the staff may become excluded. The officials themselves may be doing the edits if that's the case.

Even if that happens, there is still a lot of value in checking what kind of information manipulation happened historically.

This edit from the House of Representatives is pretty amusing: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616911728&oldid=616...

As someone who lives 30 minutes from there, and knows people that have waited for the event, I agree.

A bit OT, but I found IFTTT the most interesting part of this announcement.

https://ifttt.com/

Can you explain? I don't see the relevance.

I'm having trouble too. But I think the idea that kicked this whole thing off was @parliamentedits created by Tom Scott using IFTTT.

So, maybe that's what kitd means.

Yes, that's it. Maybe I'm just behind the times but I'd never heard of IFTTT before and it looked intriguing.

How do you search for the blocks of IP's to use? Interested in setting one up for Japan, but having trouble finding the right block to use..

A google for "japan government official website" turns up http://japan.kantei.go.jp. We can then use the ipinfo.io API to find out which network this is on:

  $ curl ipinfo.io/`dig +short japan.kantei.go.jp`
  {
    "ip": "202.32.211.142",
    "hostname": "No Hostname",
    "city": null,
    "region": null,
    "country": "JP",
    "loc": "35.6900,139.6900",
    "org": "AS2497 Internet Initiative Japan Inc."
  }

We can lookup more details at http://ipinfo.io/AS2497. It looks like lots of different organization share this network, including Coca-Cola, and a bunch of universities, so filtering based on this network is going to get us what we're after. You can also go to http://ipinfo.io/countries/jp and see all of the networks in Japan. There are a few that are government related, but there doesn't seem to be a main or single network that the government uses.

Things are easier in the UK where you have http://ipinfo.io/AS29214 (Houses of Parliament) or Ireland where you have http://ipinfo.io/AS15806 (Irish Government)

Why do you assume the website and their internet connections are in the same block?

Many companies and organisations use external hosting.

You just have to know. :)

Try asking someone in the Japanese Open Knowledge chapter: http://okfn.jp.

http://bgp.he.net/

Let's not call then "anonymous". An IP address isn't anonymous. A throwaway account is actually far more anonymous.

Depending, of course, upon whichever IP addresses are associated with the account.

If you edit as a logged-in user, your IP address is only revealed if it gets checked by a CheckUser, a specific class of user who has access to the CheckUser logs. I have access to the CheckUser logs for one Wikimedia project, for instance.

Those lookups are themselves logged and have to be justified, and people aren't allowed to just go on fishing trips into that data - there has to be a plausible case for why someone is going to go look for them.

If you are editing in a non-controversial fashion and want to preserve your privacy, using an account is a much better way to do so than editing as an IP. If your are logged in, the only people who can see your IP are (hopefully) trusted users in response to a legitimate abuse request or one of the other criteria listed in the privacy policy and CheckUser policy. If you aren't logged in, everybody can see your IP address.

According to @congresedits someone from a congress IP is editing the "David Icke" and "Bohemian Grove" articles currently, just adding the word "allegedly" in a few places. At least they have a sense of humor.

Is there a rule anywhere that forbids to edit Wikipedia from your working place?? If so, Wikipedia will lose quite a lot of editors :(

No, at least not from Wikipedia's side (maybe some workplaces have such a rule). If you're editing on behalf of your employer, e.g. you're a paid PR person whose job includes editing Wikipedia, you're supposed to disclose that as a potential conflict of interest (you can still edit after disclosure). If you're just some person editing articles on their lunch break, there's no specific rule about it. However, if you're editing from a non-logged-in account, your IP address is attached to the edits, so third-party analysts can dig through the edits looking to see if they can correlate IP ranges with questionable edits, which is what's going on here.

In the discussion about edits from the Norwegian parliament that happened yesterday, it seemed like it was mostly perfectly innocuous edits: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024417

One thing to note about this is that this is just something new in the Wikimedia Terms of Use, imposed by the head office. Before the Wikimedia Foundation made the change to the terms, the self-governance mechanisms of English Wikipedia twice rejected this concept.

The addition to the legal Terms is new, but the English Wikipedia has long had a norm that you should disclose any conflicts of interest (paid or otherwise), and there have been community processes in place to warn people who appear to be failing to do so, at least when people with undeclared COIs made edits that raised enough eyebrows for someone to notice. You could maybe fly under the radar if you never made controversial changes, but warning templates like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Uw-coi and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COI go back to the early days of the encyclopedia. Some people who were found PR-scrubbing biographies for pay were also community-banned in the past, though those were case-by-case decisions.

While it was certainly not encouraged, you'll note that undisclosed COI was not actually banned, just discouraged. There was extensive and widely advertised discussion in November 2013 [1] about three anti-COI rules, all three of which were shot down. This is not the first time it has come up, and it had repeatedly been shut down.

As for the WikiPR incident, the fact that they were banned has less to do, I imagine, with the fact that they were paid than the fact that they were essentially vandalizing Wikipedia. If they were getting paid to write neutral, balanced, well-sourced articles, I'm sure no one would have cared.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:No_paid_advocac...

The rule is that you should probably avoid exiting about your place of work, and that if you do then you should be transparant about it.

Most IP edits are good edits (most edits to WP are from IPs and they do most ofthe good edits) but there are some examples of people making unsuitable edits from their workplace.

Here's a notable example: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/government-wi...

No, nor is it necessarily a bad thing for politicians to monitor and even edit the Wiki, even their own pages. But, it is interesting to watch, and it definitely isn't appropriate for a politician or their staff to vandalize the Wiki pages of political rivals, or manipulate Wiki pages to advance a political message they're trying to sell.

Vandalism is vandalism, regardless where it comes from. There should be no need to discriminate editors on the basis of their profession or IP. Only the nature of their edits should matter.

OK, but I guess this cannot take into account edits that would be made via a VPN account?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com