Twitter Bot Posts Congressional Wikipedia Changes
posted Sunday Jul 13, 2014 by Scott Ertz
Combining data sources to produce interesting results has become a popular trend in software lately. It is a great way to experiment with development without having to create your own data. There have been lots of mobile apps created, some by talented developers and others by hacks, that take advantage of other people's data to produce unique results.
One such example is the @parliamentedits Twitter bot. This account monitors anonymous edits to Wikipedia that originate within the British Parliament's IP addresses. The system was created using the popular IFTTT platform for reacting to data. Based on this idea, another developer, Ed Summers, has created a full platform for monitoring IP addresses and posting their results.
The Twitter account is @congressedits, and this bot does almost the same thing, only by monitoring US Congressional IP addresses. Since Congress's IP range is significantly alrger than that of Parliament, this meant that IFTTT was not possible. Summers posted on his own blog,
The simplicity of combining Wikipedia and Twitter in this way immediately struck me as a potentially useful transparency tool. 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.
While nothing career-ending has happened as of yet, there are a couple of interesting changes. For example, one page had the political affiliation changed. Another changed the term "corporate lawyer" to "attorney." Both of these are, most likely, about public opinion. Another edit, however, seems to be a Congressional staffer with a love for both grammar and terrible movies, making a fairly benign edit to the page for the film Step Up 3D.
Whether or not this will ever turn up any scandals, it has certainly inspired many others to produce similar projects. Based on his code, which he posted on GitHub, there are now accounts for Australia, Germany, Berlin specifically and many others. If you are interested in following the odd edits from Congress, or want to create your own watcher, head to the source link and join the fun.
