Hi HN!<p>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: <a href="https://wikiwho.ailef.tech" rel="nofollow">https://wikiwho.ailef.tech</a><p>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.<p>Have a nice day!
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.<p>I find coordinated efforts to edit Wikipedia -- by whoever and whatever "good" their reason to be -- fairly creepy. It's like a lot of <i>little</i> Ministry of Truths running about the place trying to massage reality.
<a href="https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/04/information-wars/" rel="nofollow">https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/04/information-...</a><p>‘Long term readers will recall the Philip Cross Affair. A Wikipedia Editor named “Philip Cross” was relentlessly conducting a propaganda operation’ ..<p>‘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.’
The equivalent feed for the UK Parliament has been running since 2014 at <a href="https://www.twitter.com/parliamentedits" rel="nofollow">https://www.twitter.com/parliamentedits</a>
This is really cool!<p>But the approach seems a little flawed, as edits are attributed based on IP address. If I understand correctly that means it:<p>- doesn't capture edits made using Wikipedia accounts<p>- doesn't distinguish personal activity of individuals from those of the organization<p>- relies on a couple of third-party IP databases which aren't authoritative and may be out of date (one of them hasn't been updated in 6 years)<p>- can be circumvented by organizations using "unlisted" IP's or a VPN<p>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).<p><a href="https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/organization/46a20a0820d609f90314ea85462e9205" rel="nofollow">https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/organization/46a20a0820d609f90314...</a>
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.<p>One that stood out for me was a series of bizarre edits from CIA IP ranges to Mahmoud Ahmedinejads article<p><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6947532.stm" rel="nofollow">http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6947532.stm</a><p>The site went offline unceremoniously in 2008
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.
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.
Hilarious: <a href="https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/115cb29701ac58cd3cdf515ed043c9e7" rel="nofollow">https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/115cb29701ac58cd3cdf515ed043...</a><p>Airforce on the Pope: <a href="https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/88dfea55a8f8f112b404c62da094882f" rel="nofollow">https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/88dfea55a8f8f112b404c62da094...</a><p>Someone in the Navy taking offense at the content of the 'creation science' article: <a href="https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/06d1afb0c1ff80f387c99d007059ca9d" rel="nofollow">https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/06d1afb0c1ff80f387c99d007059...</a>
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.
Wow, this is really interesting. Nice work!<p>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.<p><a href="https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/3ccc3672d891b62a895d4821c4abbcd9" rel="nofollow">https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/3ccc3672d891b62a895d4821c4ab...</a>
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.<p>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.
It would be interesting to investigate WP pages that are "ideologically locked" for whatever reason. Maybe even come up with a metric, etc.<p>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.
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.
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!<p>Didn't think it was possible several hours after it was posted. I'm reading the comments and trying to reply now.
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.