Dan Sakamoto

21 Jan 2016

Some of my favorite Twitter bots are the ones that watch for anonymous wikipedia edits from specific IP addresses and announce them, such as @congressedits. I like them for their sheer utility; the first time I saw @congressedits was the first time I considered  the fact that government officials would be editing wikipedia pages. It was immediately apparent that this was both alerting me to a need and fulfilling it at the same time. The wiki-whistleblowers take these edits that would otherwise fly under the radar and flip our relationship to them over, broadcasting them in a highly accessible, archived, social context.

Of course, some of the tweets have serious implications, or at least violate conflict of interest rules:

While knowing the authorship of other edits make for some great WTF moments: