
Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments - ailef
https://ailef.tech/2020/04/18/discovering-wikipedia-edits-made-by-institutions-companies-and-government-agencies/
======
ailef
Hi HN!

I have built a tool that allows users to search and explore edits to the
English Wikipedia made from IP addresses associated with public organizations.
I've written a brief article explaining how it works and you can see the tool
in action here: [https://wikiwho.ailef.tech](https://wikiwho.ailef.tech)

This was just a fun side project for me to build, and so I decided to share it
with everybody else. I'll gladly receive any feedback and answer your
questions.

Have a nice day!

~~~
moonchild
The text is almost unreadably small in firefox on a 1366x768 monitor.
Screenshot: [https://0x0.st/i1K2.png](https://0x0.st/i1K2.png)

~~~
ailef
Thanks for the feedback. I believe it was because I specified the base font
size on the body element using the 'vw' unit. I've switched back to 'px' and
it should be alright now.

------
at_a_remove
Yeah, at one place I worked at, an employee was banned because she kept trying
to remove certain information about the organization from Wikipedia. I was a
little amused, but she very nearly got our whole range banned.

I find coordinated efforts to edit Wikipedia -- by whoever and whatever "good"
their reason to be -- fairly creepy. It's like a lot of _little_ Ministry of
Truths running about the place trying to massage reality.

~~~
contingencies
_It 's like a lot of little Ministry of Truths running about the place trying
to massage reality._

You just described the entirety of the advertising, public relations and
marketing industries. It's essentially commercialized brainwashing. Humans, as
social animals, have been at it at least since recounting great stories of
hunting as pre-sapien hominids and probably earlier as pre-hominids.

~~~
nateberkopec
The first sentence is also the thesis of Adam Curtis' documentary The Century
of the Self.

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
underrated (timeless) documentary.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04)

------
Stierlitz
[https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/04/information-...](https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/04/information-
wars/)

‘Long term readers will recall the Philip Cross Affair. A Wikipedia Editor
named “Philip Cross” was relentlessly conducting a propaganda operation’ ..

‘The incredible thing about “Philip Cross” was that he never took a single day
off. From 29 August 2013 to 14 May 2018 “Philip Cross” edited Wikipedia every
day, including Christmas days, for 1,721 days.’

~~~
whycombagator
> Being the BBC it downplays the affair in a number of ways – crucially, it
> gives several examples to show that Philip Cross’s edits are harmless, and
> not a single example of his thousands of vicious edits, such as his editing
> my Wikipedia entry to call my wife a stripper.

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
I don't think of Craig Murray as the peak of unbiased writing.

~~~
9q9
Everybody has biases. Murray wears his on his sleeve.

More interesting: do you have _concrete_ and _verifiable_ information that his
reporting of the Philip Cross Affair, that Murray' conjectures about its
background, are wrong? Can you put forward an alternative explanation?

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
"he wears his on his sleeve" \- his biases you mean. You've downright stated
he's openly biased. So we agree.

But that does not mean he's automatically wrong, nor that he's worthy of
dismissal overall. Just that I'd take more care to filter what he says than I
would with, say, the beeb . Not that the beeb are beyond criticism BTW.

And I'm not disagreeing with him that this PC guy is odd and worthy of
investigation.

It's just that overall fact that he indeed is openly very opinionated. That's
fine, so am I, just _caveat emptor_.

------
robin_reala
The equivalent feed for the UK Parliament has been running since 2014 at
[https://www.twitter.com/parliamentedits](https://www.twitter.com/parliamentedits)

------
rkagerer
This is really cool!

But the approach seems a little flawed, as edits are attributed based on IP
address. If I understand correctly that means it:

\- doesn't capture edits made using Wikipedia accounts

\- doesn't distinguish personal activity of individuals from those of the
organization

\- relies on a couple of third-party IP databases which aren't authoritative
and may be out of date (one of them hasn't been updated in 6 years)

\- can be circumvented by organizations using "unlisted" IP's or a VPN

Of course, the landing page is fairly transparent about these limitations. It
doesn't mean the results are uninteresting, but when I looked at the most
active month for the Government of Canada, it was clearly just an individual
that happened to work there who's interested in TV and music (particularly The
Robonic Stooges and Madonna).

[https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/organization/46a20a0820d609f90314...](https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/organization/46a20a0820d609f90314ea85462e9205)

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I believe this flawed approach is the only possible approach.

As far as the individual interested in music the edits that are just
individual edits on government time or IP address are a different problem than
the other three. I guess could have some sort of analyzer to rank how likely
the edits are to be of organizational interest and not just individual
interest. But that would probably also require enough work to need to be
monetizable for someone to put in that work.

~~~
rkagerer
Granted. I wonder if communities who maintain certain pages become aware over
time of accounts known or strongly suspected to be associated with interested
institutions. Per Wikipedia policy anyone paid to make contributions must
disclose the fact
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Organizations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Organizations))
but I'm not sure how vigilantly that's enforced. It would be interesting if
Wikimedia released a transparency report about this, or even if organizations
themselves did so (i.e. "here's a dump of all our social media activity last
year").

~~~
ailef
This page might be interesting: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-
interest_editing_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-
interest_editing_on_Wikipedia)

It lists several cases that have been discovered of accounts editing Wikipedia
for PR purposes or similar.

------
vector_spaces
12 years ago there used to be a fantastic tool called WikiScanner that did
exactly this. It made headlines for revealing edits by intelligence agencies
and corporate character assassination campaigns around the world.

One that stood out for me was a series of bizarre edits from CIA IP ranges to
Mahmoud Ahmedinejads article

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6947532.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6947532.stm)

The site went offline unceremoniously in 2008

~~~
ailef
Yes, I mention this in the article as well. I came up with this idea and then
discovered it had already been done before, but since it has been offline for
such a very long time I thought it could be cool to do it again 12 years
later!

------
EE84M3i
At a previous enterprise job, I actually emailed ethics@ when I caught a
coworker editing a Wikipedia page in violation of the Wikipedia rules and
company policy. It became clear during my subsequent interactions with the
general counsel that they didn't exactly get many emails to that alias, nor
did they really know how to go about handling a relatively minor violation.

------
gruez
Institutions, companies and governments can't bother to edit from a VPN, or
from a tethered cell phone?

~~~
Stierlitz
> Institutions, companies and governments can't bother to edit from a VPN, or
> from a tethered cell phone?

IP addresses are masked if using a registered account. It would be interesting
to cross-reference those except Wikipedia don't gave this out.

I do know I opted-out of Wikipedia after being censured for posting the birth
date of a deceased individual. In violating of privacy policy or some such
WP:bla bla bla. The terms of which are impossible for the average individual
to decode. A fortnite later the information was inserted by some senior
administrator. I guess all Wikipedians are equal, except some are more equal
than others.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
I stopped editing when it became clear that all of my edits were immediately
reverted. They were all simple grammar, spelling, or tense modifications. I
assume the original authors had scripts in place to make sure there were no
changes.

~~~
teddyh
Someone should make a wikibot to _make_ such small innocuous edits, in order
to detect such rogue editors who consider themselves “owners” of certain pages
(against policy, I might add). It would perhaps also be possible to find at
least some of these by detecting these changes in the editing history in cases
such as yours.

~~~
zozbot234
The trick is to post the proposed edit on the talk page first, then make it
after a few days if nobody objects. If your edit is reverted, you can point
out that the user didn't raise any concerns on talk. Reverts are very much
supposed to be a last resort measure, the primary way of shaping a wiki
article is via discussion/deliberation on the talk page. Also very handy for
edits that you know to be controversial.

------
8bitsrule
This is very welcome, because it's a side of WP content that isn't very
transparent without a lot of time-consuming scrounging. Hopefully others can
build on this foundation.

------
Evidlo
Is it just me or the font on WikiWho really small? Also it doesn't seem to
scale correctly with page zoom for some reason.

~~~
ailef
Thanks for this feedback, I'll try to fix this as soon as possible.

------
contingencies
Hilarious:
[https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/115cb29701ac58cd3cdf515ed043...](https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/115cb29701ac58cd3cdf515ed043c9e7)

Airforce on the Pope:
[https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/88dfea55a8f8f112b404c62da094...](https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/88dfea55a8f8f112b404c62da094882f)

Someone in the Navy taking offense at the content of the 'creation science'
article:
[https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/06d1afb0c1ff80f387c99d007059...](https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/06d1afb0c1ff80f387c99d007059ca9d)

------
stareatgoats
Great work, even with the caveats others have mentioned! But to maybe add yet
another caveat: do you or anyone here know of any way that a malicious actor
could expose a complete fake IP address, say in order to discredit an
organization, other than working though an infected machine within the
organization? Pardon my ignorance, and my intention is not to have such
techniques be made common knowledge (if they exist), but if this is possible
then it is an important aspect too.

------
bobbiechen
Wow, this is really interesting. Nice work!

Just a random example I found clicking around, an edit from the U.S.
Department of State, removing a paragraph of criticism from the article "2003
invasion of Iraq". Looking at the history from Wikipedia, it was added back a
few minutes later.

[https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/3ccc3672d891b62a895d4821c4ab...](https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/3ccc3672d891b62a895d4821c4abbcd9)

------
xwolfi
I find the title and article a bit misleading. Like "companies" dont edit
wikipedia, usually it's a random dude forgetting to log with his phone to
correct spelling, a gross mistake when he was reading his CEOs life or
vandalism.

I'm not sure why this project stopped at the obvious: it should go further and
find "negative" edits that are beyond spelling, fact checking or general
updates.

~~~
ailef
Well, I happen to disagree. It is a well documented fact that companies often
try to manipulate Wikipedia (either directly or by paying somebody else to do
it). Granted, majority of the edits are non-malicious in nature but finding
controversial edits automatically is really hard, and the goal of the tool
would actually be to aid people in finding them.

------
downerending
It would be interesting to investigate WP pages that are "ideologically
locked" for whatever reason. Maybe even come up with a metric, etc.

Some of this would be rank politics, of course, and some PR edits. But others
might be rather surprising. As I recall, for several years, the main C++ page
forbade any substantial criticism of the language.

------
charlchi
Wow. This is really, really cool. Having this level transparency on who is
spreading narratives or propaganda in what way is very interesting. In my few
brief searches on some history-related pages you can see hoardes of edits from
US military bases for instance.

------
ailef
Wow, I thought the post was dead and I went to sleep with it having only ~5
votes and I find out today it exploded!

Didn't think it was possible several hours after it was posted. I'm reading
the comments and trying to reply now.

------
DonCopal
You do realize that if an employer makes an edit during work, the IP will be
of the company. Your title makes it seem like it's the official stance of the
whole company.

------
OldFatCactus
Why is the US Navy so active on such innocuous articles?

~~~
hutzlibu
Bored sailors?

Posting from inside does not mean, they do so on assignment.

------
sam1r
This is awesome!

------
maxfan8
Nice job!

Try editing the title to Show HN: (more appropriate).

~~~
dang
I've added that now.

