
Anon – Tweet about anonymous Wikipedia edits from particular IP address ranges - wodow
https://github.com/edsu/anon
======
silverlight
How interesting. For example, this one was recently linked via the Twitter
account:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616585674&oldid=615...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616585674&oldid=615623458)

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.

~~~
jjcm
Some of the edits are far less subtle:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616939061&oldid=614...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616939061&oldid=614523933#National_conservative_leader)

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](http://www.huelskamp.org/meettim.html)

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danso
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](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...

~~~
jrochkind1
The npm package is by the same author as the OP, he just extracted it into a
package for re-use, so, yeah!

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zqfm
It's a bit concerning that
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616915051&oldid=61...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616915051&oldid=616543585)
would be coming from someone in congress.

~~~
chimeracoder
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...](http://boingboing.net/2013/08/06/us-senate-ip-address-linked-
to.html)

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

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

~~~
higherpurpose
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.

~~~
middleclick
Wikipedia blocks Tor.

~~~
x1798DE
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.

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rictic
This edit from the House of Representatives is pretty amusing:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616911728&oldid=616...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616911728&oldid=616095553)

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

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

[https://ifttt.com/](https://ifttt.com/)

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

~~~
frogpelt
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.

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

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minikomi
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..

~~~
coderholic
A google for "japan government official website" turns up
[http://japan.kantei.go.jp](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](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](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](http://ipinfo.io/AS29214) (Houses of Parliament) or
Ireland where you have [http://ipinfo.io/AS15806](http://ipinfo.io/AS15806)
(Irish Government)

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

Many companies and organisations use external hosting.

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

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

~~~
tommorris
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.

------
msane
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.

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

~~~
_delirium
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024417)

~~~
x1798DE
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.

~~~
_delirium
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Uw-coi) and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COI](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.

~~~
x1798DE
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:No_paid_advocacy)

------
kelvin0
OK, but I guess this cannot take into account edits that would be made via a
VPN account?

