The US Army has made six hundred contributions to a list of ethnic slurs: http://wikiwho.ailef.tech/page/11014515 They appear as “PEO STAMIS” here, which appears to be an IT group?
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Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments
71–80 of 96 posts
Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments
#72One of the Navy Network Information Center (NNIC)'s top edits is the Subic rape case.[0] Predictably and, unfortunately, it's essentially all edits trying to play down the case or cast doubt I've been a Wikipedia editor for a few years now (mostly botany-related pages) and I've been quite the pessimist about the platform for almost as long. But browsing this website has gotten me really demoralized to be honest. Many…
I completely lost trust in Wikipedia once I realized recent history is literally being rewritten by biased editors. For one, check the edit history of anything Russia/Ukraine war related, it's a complete shitshow.
Of course it is gonna be a shitshow. It’s still happening! Everybody has a vested interest in making those pages reflect their version of reality. And the non-cynic part of me says that is fine and to be expected. In the fog of war there is no true, objective reality yet. It takes a good long while for humanity to settle down and cooler heads can then piece together an accurate view of events.
There is plenty of good content on Wikipedia… you just won’t find it for highly potent current events unfolding right this instant.
Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments
#73I am surprised how many people goof off at work writing wikipedia pages about their favorite TV shows. Especially you, Canadians... lol: http://wikiwho.ailef.tech/organization/46a20a0820d609f90314e...
It’s a good thing to remember… just because it comes from a corporate IP doesn’t mean much. It is highly likely most of these edits were done by employees goofing around on Wikipedia while on their employer’s network.
If you broke down comments on HN by IP, I bet the distribution would be highly concentrated to tech companies IP ranges. Assuming that every comment was posted for nefarious reason would be flawed. The truth is much less exciting. It’s just dudes goofing around at work…
Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments
#74This is an amazing tool, but I'd caution it's using IP lists for groups of specific organizations. One of the 2 IP lists provided by the author is just the US military: https://gist.github.com/artfulhacker/a6eb800e58f2eb6f9231
The section "MOST ACTIVE ORGANIZATIONS" shouldn't be taken as a list of the most active organizations in the world editing Wikipedia, just the most active organizations that made an IP list the tool is using.
Anyone using the very large number of static IP addresses on these lists will be pooled as an edit by the organization that maintains that IP range. This means a seaman in the Navy editing a TV show article on their free time may be pooled into the "Navy Network Information Center (NNIC)". It doesn't necessary mean the NNIC has a special interest in editing 'Breaking Bad' episode synopses.
Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is one to infer from these? That congresspeople, like others that are afforded the right, also execute trades?
That congresspeople use insider information gained from sitting on various committees to execute suspiciously-timed trades [1], such as: -heavy buying of semiconductors in the lead up to passage of the CHIPS act -mass sell-off by members and their families within the day of the first briefing on the coming COVID policy mandates -purchase of defense stocks by members who were briefed on the Russian invasion of Ukraine…
Is this data immediately accessible? What's to stop me from just following this data and copying their trades 1:1?
Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments
#76I am surprised how many people goof off at work writing wikipedia pages about their favorite TV shows. Especially you, Canadians... lol: http://wikiwho.ailef.tech/organization/46a20a0820d609f90314e...
It might be the case that government employees are mostly just goofing off at work on Wikipedia. That's a perfectly normal, likely, and very plausible explanation of reality.
Another potential explanation is a practice of obfuscation. There might be one critical edit of some government corruption or something else buried in a list that looks like 99% tv shows. Those TV shows might have been edited solely to bury the 1 critical edit they needed to make that will be ignored because it's surrounded by hundreds of other benign looking edits. Without examining each and every edit, it's hard to completely dismiss this kind of explanation.
Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments
#77This tool is interesting and useful, but it's important to remember that it is constrained by the lists of mapped IP addresses. It will only show edits made by these specific sources, and no others:
https://github.com/ruebot/gccaedits-ip-address-ranges/blob/m...
https://gist.github.com/artfulhacker/a6eb800e58f2eb6f9231
It would be a very basic mistake conclude that these are the only groups editing Wikipedia articles to control the narrative, just because they're the only ones being sampled.
Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments
#78I think I'm most puzzled why the Navy is making so many edits on Boys II Men founding member Marc Nelson. The read I'm getting is they are by Marc Nelson himself since a lot of them seem to reflect his personal regrets about leaving right before they blew up.
Incredibly odd.
Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
That congresspeople use insider information gained from sitting on various committees to execute suspiciously-timed trades [1], such as: -heavy buying of semiconductors in the lead up to passage of the CHIPS act -mass sell-off by members and their families within the day of the first briefing on the coming COVID policy mandates -purchase of defense stocks by members who were briefed on the Russian invasion of Ukraine…
Is this data immediately accessible? What's to stop me from just following this data and copying their trades 1:1?
Public officials in the US need to file their financial activities within a certain time limit, and and this is accessible to anyone with a Bloomberg Terminal.
Usually by the time this info is made public the best profits would already have been made. There are also plenty of examples of members not filing at all. Of course nothing happens to them...
This was a bit of a scandal when Pelosi's activities became a bit too obvious (e.g [1] - and I'm not saying this is just a Democrat issue, they all do it), but the furor very quickly died down after democracy came under threat during the midterms because the other party are neo-fascists or communists, depending on which billionaire-owned news source you follow.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/09/congress-moves-towards-banni...
Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments
#80There was fun time when Ed Summers made a tool to monitor Wikipedia edits from some IPs pool realtime, and it turned into worldwide effort with Twitter bots monitoring many governments and big corporations, highlighting a lot of cringe edits and poor attempts to remove some info from Wikipedia. Many bots are still active, you can find source code and list of bots here https://github.com/edsu/anon
Also there is analysis of old edits (2002-2014) using IP ranges collected for bots https://jarib.github.io/anon-history/, source code: https://github.com/jarib/anon-history