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Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments
- ailef 6y agoHi 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!
- jimbob45 6y agoThis is really neat. Great work!
- abhishektwr 6y agoLooks great. This could be interesting feature for media monitoring companies.
- moonchild 6y agoThe text is almost unreadably small in firefox on a 1366x768 monitor. Screenshot: https://0x0.st/i1K2.png https://0x0.st/i1K2.png
- unixhero 6y agoUhm zoom out? Ctrl -
- rkagerer 6y agoI have this problem as well, on Chrome, when the window width is > about 1200px.
- ailef 6y agoThanks 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.
- Eduard 6y agoDo you know about https://www.wikiwho.net/ https://www.wikiwho.net/ ?
- ailef 6y agoI was not aware of that, really interesting project. I actually may need to change the name then...
- 8bitsrule 6y agoThis 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.
- maxfan8 6y agoNice job! Try editing the title to Show HN: (more appropriate).
- dang 6y agoI've added that now.
- sam1r 6y agoThis is awesome!
- charlchi 6y agoWow. 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.
- gruez 6y agoInstitutions, companies and governments can't bother to edit from a VPN, or from a tethered cell phone?
- Stierlitz 6y ago> 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 6y agoI 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 6y agoSomeone 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 6y agoThe 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.
- Stierlitz 6y agohttps://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/04/information-wars/ https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/04/information-... ‘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 6y ago> 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 6y agoI don't think of Craig Murray as the peak of unbiased writing.
- 9q9 6y agoEverybody 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 6y ago"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.
- Evidlo 6y agoIs it just me or the font on WikiWho really small? Also it doesn't seem to scale correctly with page zoom for some reason.
- OldFatCactus 6y agoWhy is the US Navy so active on such innocuous articles?
- hutzlibu 6y agoBored sailors? Posting from inside does not mean, they do so on assignment.
- at_a_remove 6y agoYeah, 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 6y agoIt'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 6y agoThe first sentence is also the thesis of Adam Curtis' documentary The Century of the Self.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y agounderrated (timeless) documentary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04
- bobbiechen 6y agoWow, 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/3ccc3672d891b62a895d4821c4abbcd9 https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/3ccc3672d891b62a895d4821c4ab...
- contingencies 6y agoHilarious: https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/115cb29701ac58cd3cdf515ed043c9e7 https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/115cb29701ac58cd3cdf515ed043... Airforce on the Pope: https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/88dfea55a8f8f112b404c62da094882f https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/88dfea55a8f8f112b404c62da094... Someone in the Navy taking offense at the content of the 'creation science' article: https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/06d1afb0c1ff80f387c99d007059ca9d https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/06d1afb0c1ff80f387c99d007059...
- rkagerer 6y agoThis 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/46a20a0820d609f90314ea85462e9205 https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/organization/46a20a0820d609f90314...
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoI 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 6y agoGranted. 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").
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- ailef 6y agoWow, 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.
- azralagharra 6y agoTop 10 Trusted Cryptocurrency Exchange List https://coinmarket01.blogspot.com/2020/04/top-10-trusted-cryptocurrency-exchange.html https://coinmarket01.blogspot.com/2020/04/top-10-trusted-cry...
- vector_spaces 6y ago12 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 6y agoYes, 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!
- robin_reala 6y agoThe equivalent feed for the UK Parliament has been running since 2014 at https://www.twitter.com/parliamentedits https://www.twitter.com/parliamentedits
- EE84M3i 6y agoAt 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.
- klohto 6y agoMust be great working with you
- saystupidthings 6y agoYou sound like a dick. Maybe just talk to the coworker.
- stareatgoats 6y agoGreat 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.
- DonCopal 6y agoYou 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.
- xwolfi 6y agoI 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 6y agoWell, 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 6y agoIt 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.