Every edit to Wikipedia is public, as is the profile of every editor. Many of those who use and maintain Wikipedia set up profiles and take part in the chat that makes up the larger editorial community, but most editors are anonymous – they leave on a record of an IP address, and often make only a couple of edits at most. (Lots of these anonymous accounts are spammers or vandals, and the “real” editors spend a lot of time clearing up after them.)
If you know someone’s IP address, then, it’s relatively easy to keep track of any edits they might make. This was the thinking behind @ParliamentEdits, a Twitter bot set up to track any and all edits to Wikipedia made by the known block of IP addresses assigned to the Houses of Parliament. It in turn gave birth to similar bots keeping tabs on, for example, the US Congress, or the government of Canada. There have been a spate of stories over the last year about government employees making anonymous, malicious edits to Wikipedia pages for political purposes, thanks to these bots – like Channel 4 discovering that someone was trying to downplay the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes.
Content from our partners
