Ok, this is a blast from the past. Here are some rough notes for a conversation today with Ernesto about how congressedits worked, and Wikipedia data more generally. I couldn’t summon the will to create a slidedeck, but I was taking some notes, and it seemed easiest to just drop them here. Ernesto does some amazing work studying the political dimensions of the web.

This is really just a list of links to follow…

What was it?

• archive: https://edsu.github.io/congressedits-archive/
• article about it: https://source.opennews.org/articles/automating-transparency/
• anon: https://github.com/edsu/anon
• other anon bots: https://github.com/edsu/anon?tab=readme-ov-file#community

How did it work?

• anonymous editing of wikipedia uses IP address of the user as the username: e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1210806587&oldid=1200740098
• what is my IP address: https://whatismyipaddress.com/
• IP ranges for Congress from GovTrack: https://github.com/govtrack/govtrack.us-web/blob/031ea63cc4dda2a24c341834f081f46519f7f7f9/website/middleware.py#L15-L32
• previous work on wikistream: https://wikistream.toolforge.org
• Event Stream API: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Event_Platform/EventStreams
• example of listening to Event Stream API with Python: https://gist.github.com/edsu/80bf00eacbe97378568acf4964bb7e23

Research

• Wikipedia XTools: https://xtools.wmcloud.org/ec for example, search for edits from the US Senate: 156.33.0.0/16
• CIDR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing
• Internet registries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry
• Registration Data Access Protocol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration_Data_Access_Protocol
• ARIN: https://search.arin.net/rdap/
• Another example: tracking Ukrainian Websites: https://github.com/edsu/gov-ua