Bot Tweets Anonymous Wikipedia Edits From Capitol Hill 95
mpicpp writes about a new Twitter bot that reports all of the anonymous Wikipedia edits being made from the US Senate and House of Representatives. Ed Summers, an open source Web developer, recently saw a friend tweet about Parliament WikiEdits, a UK Twitter "bot" that watched for anonymous Wikipedia edits coming from within the British Parliament's internal networks. Summers was immediately inspired to do the same thing for the US Congress. "The simplicity of combining Wikipedia and Twitter in this way immediately struck me as a potentially useful transparency tool," Summers wrote in his personal blog. "So using my experience on a previous side project [Wikistream, a Web application that watches Wikipedia editing activity], I quickly put together a short program that listens to all major language Wikipedias for anonymous edits from Congressional IP address ranges and tweets them." The stream for the bot, @congressedits, went live a day later, and it now provides real-time tweets when anonymous edits of Wikipedia pages are made. Summers also posted the code to GitHub so that others interested in creating similar Twitter bots can riff on his work.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Also available for UK, Canada, France ... (Score:5, Informative)
One thing to remember here is that most of these edits are probably made by junior IT staff rather than elected representatives (recall the recent Hillsborough case [telegraph.co.uk] in the UK).
Some hilarity (Score:0, Informative)
There's some hilarity in here. An anonymous edit made by Congress to the article Horse head mask.
Re:Actually, the edits look good! (Score:4, Informative)
I agree in principle, but you missed the context and a bit on completeness on the lawyer -> attorney edit.
It was actually "Corporate Lawyer" -> "Attorney", which has a different feel to it.