An open-source project to track edits to Wikipedia made from within parliament was nearly scuppered by the government’s refusal to reveal the IP addresses that MPs and Lords use to access the internet.
A Freedom of Information request, which would reveal whether MPs and peers were engaging in “astroturfing” on the crowdsourced encyclopaedia, was turned down on the basis that “releasing the information would be likely to prejudice the prevention or detection of crime.”
The @ParliamentEdits Twitter account, set up by the journalist and developer Tom Scott, was designed to automatically tweet whenever Wikipedia was edited by someone within the Houses of Parliament.
Its creation followed a wave of news stories of elected officials and government employees embarrassed by Wikipedia edits made from within the workplace, although Scott had been tracking the edits for considerably longer. In June, a civil servant was sacked for offensive edits made relating to the Hillsborough disaster, and a total of 5,500 edits have been made from within the Houses of Parliament since 2003.
Key to the creation of Parliament Edits was knowledge of the IP addresses that the legislature uses to connect to the internet, but in 2014, those addresses were changed, leaving Parliament Edits unable to function.
Scott attempted to find out the new IP addresses, but was turned down by the House of Commons, which claimed that it would be predjudicial to attempts to prevent crime – despite the fact that similar information has previously been released by government ministers in response to parliamentary questions.
While he has the right to appeal against the finding, Scott says “I suspect it wouldn’t be fruitful to appeal, and it’s not a fight I have time to enter into right now”.
The project can continue, even without the government’s aid.
“Bear in mind that the general IP block assigned to parliament is public knowledge anyway,” Scott explained. “All that’s been declined is the more specific detail of which particular addresses parliament uses. I was hoping that they’d have a consistent response, given that they’ve previously released that data.
“Even in the absence of that more specific data, though, Jonty Wareing has done an excellent job showing that folks within parliament appear to edit from many of those publicly-known IPs.”
With that new information, and new code from web developer Ed Summers, the Twitter account has been brought back to life.
It has already spotted two edits from within parliament – one, a simple grammatical correction on the entry about the first ever female German general, and the second correcting a factual error on the article about former solicitor general Derek Spencer.
Parliament Edits also inspired the creation of similar projects tracking other legislatures. A Russian spin off discovered edits being made exonerating the nation from the MH17 crash, while the US version eventually led to Congress being temporarily banned from Wikipedia for abusive edits.
