Show HN: We built an open source tool for journalists to inspect Wikipedia edits

This is awesome! I&#x27;ve wanted to build something like this for a while, but never gotten the chance :). Better tools like this are essential for helping users accept and reject the correct edits, and making it easier to investigate when reversions might be unjustified.<p>The only problem I noticed is that clicking the footnotes does not work, which makes it harder to evaluate the legitimacy of an edit (well, it just means I have to have the current article open as well).

A tip on the diffing:<p>We have done something similar when diffing HTML, e.g. replacing the HTML with single unicodes. And then we run the diff and get several diff-segments (EQUALS, INS, DEL). What we have done, is then to scan those for tags, and split them into a new type.<p>So an insert like INS(something \xE000 else) would become three <i>changes</i>. E.g. INS(something ) INS_TAG(\xE000) INS( else). So the INS_TAG shouldn&#x27;t be wrapped in &lt;ins&gt; when converting this back to HTML.

I&#x27;m not sure if Wikipedia is OK with that, considering the load it generates [1]. I am currently doing some research on Wikipedia, and for my purposes I use the official dumps site at <a href="https://dumps.wikimedia.org/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dumps.wikimedia.org&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;robots.txt</a>

Oh boy, TWG on HN! ;) Great job with this Peter, playing around with it a bit more, but I&#x27;m intrigued.

<i></i>You tried to access the address <a href="http://wikiwash.metronews.ca/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wikiwash.metronews.ca&#x2F;</a>, which is currently unavailable.<i></i><p>:(

Thanks for releasing this. Any plans to support other sites? Perhaps an open source diffbot server?

Great write-up!

wikiwash.metronews.ca doesn&#x27;t load

not a very useful project. Problem for journalists isn&#x27;t &quot;how to inspect edits&quot; but rather &quot;which edits on which entries should I inspect&quot;

This is a surveillance tool so that &#x27;we&#x27; can monitor &#x27;their&#x27; activity and take appropriate measures. Wikipedia&#x27;s &quot;openly editable model&quot; in 2014.