Anonymous Wikipedia edits from the Norwegian parliament and government offices

If anyone wants to try this historically for an arbitrary IP block, Google's BigQuery has a snapshot of English Wikipedia edits from April 2010: https://developers.google.com/bigquery/docs/dataset-wikipedi...

Here's an example query: https://gist.github.com/jarib/c16345c19971e324ac82

Please star this issue to bring the snapshot up to date: https://code.google.com/p/google-bigquery/issues/detail?id=1...

kmfrk2• 12 years ago

- Australia (https://twitter.com/AussieParlEdits)

- South Africa (https://twitter.com/parlizaedits)

- Germany (https://twitter.com/reichstagedits)

raziel2p• 12 years ago

Looking through the first 20 or so, all I can find are added links, cross-references and improved grammar. Someone's lunch pastime maybe :)

jtheory• 12 years ago

Right -- this is one of the few cases where I'd rather see a link to a blog post (providing some analysis of the raw data) rather than just the link to the data.

Government-IP updates can be either completely innocuous (someone's lunch break habit, or possible goofing off during working hours... in which case this might get someone in hot water), or seriously ominous, if "re-writing history" is someone's paid job.

The former case isn't news-worthy, is it?

userbinator• 12 years ago

I randomly scanned through the list and found the same thing, nothing suspicious.

If the government was really determined to change history, you would think they wouldn't be doing it from their own IP ranges...

guhcampos2• 12 years ago

The thing is we are conditioned to believe that anything the government does, especially anonymously, is necessarily bad.

From what I've seem on the list, this has been some kind of an effort to actually improve the arcticles, and update government related information, like embassy addresses and websites.

It looks like there is a bunch of responsible, well intentioned and helpful people in the government - at lealst in Norway.

lars• 12 years ago

Interesting data, but I fail to see anything sinister going on here. Skimming through the list, it looks like 90% of the articles fall into one of three categories: Streets in Oslo, embassies in Oslo and people I mostly haven't heard of (i.e. not politically controversial characters). I don't see any edits intended to sway public opinion.

bagosm• 12 years ago

Same here, my only worry is that maybe that's exactly the strategy they use to blur the waters. On the other hand, propaganda can't be that forward, can it?

jessriedel2• 12 years ago

"Muddy the waters"? I think lines, not water, are blurred :)

SolarNet• 12 years ago

I think the point of the post was, look at how you can see this government's edits, why can't we see every governments edits?

JacobAldridge2• 12 years ago

This is one of those cases where the changed Title on HN misleads [1]. These aren't changes from the 'government' they are changes from 'parliament and government offices'. Occams Razor would suggest they are more likely to be staffers and the occasional Patsy Cline-loving MP, rather than cabinet policies being enacted.

[1] Title as I write is "10 years of anonymous Wikipedia edits from the Norwegian government"

acdha2• 12 years ago

That deliberately inflammatory wording also relies on the fact that some people hear “government” and immediately thinking of intelligence agencies or cynical political operators and ignore the fact that, particularly in well-reputed free countries like Norway with extremely low corruption rates, there are many government employees who feel a mandate for actual public service, and are doing non-trivial research & analysis, etc. to make sure that lawmakers and other parts of the government make the right decisions.

The kind of people you hire to do that sort of work are exactly the kind of people who are going to update Wikipedia when they see something wrong or incomplete — or possibly the person who might get a message if someone can't find the right info on Wikipedia.

Amezarak• 12 years ago

The same thing is true for the vast majority of the Wikipedia edits attributed to the US Congress. Not only are most if not all of them written by staffers and other government employees who almost certainly not receiving any direction to make the edits, they're almost all innocuous spelling or grammar edits and a large portion of them aren't even on political pages.

I don't know if I'd attribute it to public service so much as boredom and personal hobbies, though. The headline, of course, is the same as in this case - that "the government" is making Wikipedia edits, with malicious implications - though there have at least been some cases of vandalism, probably by staffers.

shapov• 12 years ago

I thought so as well. Most of the changes to the articles seem to be spelling corrections, and such.

jensen2k• 12 years ago

I'm sorry about that. That's on me. It was necessary to edit it to get below the 80 char limit for post titles.

JacobAldridge2• 12 years ago

All good - I suspected that was the reason.

Kiro• 12 years ago

It's phrased like this is some big evil scheme going on but looking at the edits it's exactly the kind of stuff I believe the government should keep up to date on Wikipedia.

catshirt2• 12 years ago

seemed to me like it was explicitly phrased so you WOULDN'T think that.

imagine the title (and source) if they were making controversial edits?

jessriedel2• 12 years ago

I think he's bothered by the vaguely sinister use of "anonymous". It's a true adjective, of course, but not really worth including in the title unless you're trying to imply something bad (and get page views).

jarib2• 12 years ago

What source of edits do you think would yield more interesting results?

waterlesscloud• 12 years ago

There's a Twitter feed of wikipedia edits that originate from the US Congress - https://twitter.com/congressedits

My favorite is the edit of a congressman's bio from saying he used to be a "corporate lawyer" to "attorney".

dbpokorny• 12 years ago

Wikipedia is getting very awkward - it is clear that some articles are 100% propaganda, while others appear to have honest insight into world events.

I guess it's good to break the habit of thinking that history (like AP US History) can be read in an "unfiltered" way, but without something like a comprehensive database of every single Wikipedia edit, with tools to help detect bias (example: CIA wants to edit an article) Wikipedia will become a victim in the information arms race.

In this particular case, I think statistics can reverse the obvious "tragedy of the commons" situation with Wikipedia.

For example: tools to help with associating edits / edit conspiracy / sockpuppet detection

Anonymous Wikipedia edits from the Norwegian parliament and government offices

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