Editing Congressional Wikipedia Pages

ArsTechnica reports (h/t JPP):

Ed Summers, an open source Web developer, recently saw a friend tweet about Parliament WikiEdits, a UK Twitter “bot” that watched for anonymous Wikipedia edits coming from within the British Parliament’s internal networks. Summers was immediately inspired to do the same thing for the US Congress.

“The simplicity of combining Wikipedia and Twitter in this way immediately struck me as a potentially useful transparency tool,” Summers wrote in his personal blog. “So using my experience on a previous side project [Wikistream, a Web application that watches Wikipedia editing activity], I quickly put together a short program that listens to all major language Wikipedias for anonymous edits from Congressional IP address ranges… and tweets them.”

The stream for the bot, @congressedits, went live a day later, and it now provides real-time tweets when anonymous edits of Wikipedia pages are made. Summers also posted the code to GitHub so that others interested in creating similar Twitter bots can riff on his work.

Unlobbyists

Many posts have discussed non-lobbying lobbying, or unlobbying. Thomas Edsall writes at The New York Times:

If you look at the numbers, it may seem that lobbying is in decline, but it isn’t; it’s just taking different forms. What was once straightforward lobbying has become, in effect, a full service PR-advertising-social media operation, very little of which is covered by federal regulation.

In a field buffeted by the economic meltdown of 2008, the current legislative standstill on Capitol Hill, the emergence of high-tech competitors and the passage of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 (which subjects registered lobbyists to a stringent regulatory regime including the threat of criminal sanctions and prison time), this shift in the influence industry poses a broader question. Are the days of the glad-handing lobbyist, carrying an envelope of PAC checks and the proposed wording of a client’s legislative amendment, numbered?

Carter Eskew, a founding partner of the Glover Park Group, which lobbies and provides a host of other services to clients, raised this question in a conversation with me.

Looking to future sources of new revenue, Eskew has concluded that “ ‘relationship lobbying’ is dead, or at least not where the growth will be.” The traditional lobbyist, he argues, is no longer the éminence grise of days past but instead has been reduced to serving as a conduit for campaign contributions from corporate and trade association PACs to candidates.

These comments overstate the case.  On many low-profile or technical issues, traditional lobbying is essential.  Lobbyists spend a great deal of time dealing with staffers or executive-branch officials about the fine print of obscure laws or rules. These efforts usually do not involve PR campaigns but instead depend on the knowledge and expertise of the lobbyists.

Still, the article makes good points about the new world of public affairs, which now encompasses social media.

Ed Rogers, who worked on the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, is currently a registered lobbyist and chairman of the BGR Group (formerly Barbour Griffith & Rogers). BGR, in addition to straightforward lobbying, has a web-based practice and a public relations arm. Rogers noted in an interview that the Internet is changing the nature of lobbying. Now “it’s essential to manage the Google hole, what’s Google got about you, you have to inject content, enhance the good and dilute the bad.” The same assertive approach, Rogers argues, applies to YouTube videos and Wikipedia entries.

Wikipedia and the Vice Presidency

Micah Sifry writes at TechPresident:

The act of observing something can sometimes change the thing being observed. Case in point: myobservation on Monday that we might be able to get useful clues as to the identity of Mitt Romney's vice president pick by watching for a surge of edits on their Wikipedia page.

Not any more.

Last night, Stephen Colbert played a snippet of a Fox News report noting the jump in last-minute edits to Sarah Palin's page four years ago, and then he went to town. Assuming that Wikipedia edits were the tip-off, he declared, "We could be looking at Vice President Season Six of Buffy-the-Vampire Slayer. So, Nation, let your voice be heard in this history decision. Go on Wikipedia, and make as many edits as possible to your favorite VP contender." He then proceeded to mime editing Tim Pawlenty's page. (You can find the segment at about 8:40 minutes in, here.)

Well, Rob Portman's page has had 112 edits since Sunday, against 52 for Marco Rubio and just 18 for Pawlenty. But as of last night, the Pawlenty page was locked to protect it from vandalism. In addition, the Portman and Rubio pages have been "semi-protected" by site administrators, which means they can only be edited by registered users. The same thing has been done to the pages for Paul Ryan, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, and David Petraeus (who got a burst of attention yesterday because of an item on the Drudge Report). That means that only people who have already been on Wikipedia for at least four days and previously made ten edits to other unprotected pages can edit these pages.

Congress and Wikipedia

At Buzzfeed, Andrew Kaczynski offers some examples of how congressional aides have altered their bosses' Wikipedia entries:

• The 11 Strangest Edits By Congressional Staff To Wikipedia
• 33 Embarrassing Congressional Edits To Members' Wikipedia Pages
• 11 Awkward Edits By Senate Staffers To Wikipedia

The Renton Patch writes of Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA):

According to BuzzFeed, staffers "decided to do a bit of historical airbrushing" for Rep. Adam Smith by "add(ing) lengthy additions to Smith's biography". A search of edits made to his page by Mercer Island Patch reveal several edits were made shortly after Rep. began running for re-election in June 2010, when the US House-registered editor removed portions of the existing content and replaced it with a substantial re-writing of the "Biography" section with titles such as "Home Grown Leadership" and "Work in Congress" rather than the standard format adopted by other Wikipedia editors. The text was taken from the biography of the congressman's webpage. For a time after June 2010, the page remained largely unedited. Shortly after the 2010 election, another editor tried to reverse the changes, only for staffers to once again change it back in January 2011.

Reached by phone, Rep. Adam Smith said defending himself and his record against false attacks was the main reason for the edits, and that the edits were made on just three occasions and unrelated to any re-election effort.

Kony Fades in American Media

Previous posts mentioned the upswell of attention to Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony.  The upswell, like so many in the contemporary media, was brief:  Brian Stelter writes at The New York Times:

Today, this is what our news culture looks like to consumers: individual bursts of light that appear out of nowhere and disappear just as fast.

What else can we call a story that generates 100 million views on YouTube in a matter of days, garners outrage among young people across the country and spurs several resolutions in Congress — and then practically vanishes?

The YouTube views were for a video produced by Invisible Children, a small nonprofit group that was trying to draw attention to Joseph Kony, the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, an African guerrilla group that has mounted attacks against civilians for more than 20 years. But his name probably needs no explanation now. “KONY 2012,” as the video was dubbed, became an international news sensation in early March, “rocketing across Twitter and Facebook at a pace rarely seen for any video, let alone a half-hour film about a distant conflict in Central Africa,” as

The New York Times put it in a front-page article on March 9.

The video succeeded in making Mr. Kony famous, which was the first of the group’s stated goals. Maybe a year from now he’ll be arrested, as the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has vowed. “Now we have the citizens of the world pushing for that, and that is helping a lot,” he told The Associated Press earlier this month. “It will be the end of the Joseph Kony crimes.” But in the United States, at least, Mr. Kony is no longer in the news or on Twitter’s ever-refreshing list of trending topics.

...

Of the 7.1 million page views of Wikipedia’s article on Mr. Kony so far this year, 5 million were racked up in the three days when the video was a hot topic online. Now it’s viewed fewer than 15,000 times a day.

Reddit Weighs In

At Politico, Jennifer Martinez reports:

Social news website Reddit, Wikipedia and scores of other smaller websites that went dark in protest of anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA helped turn the inside-the-Beltway lobbying racket on its head, Reddit’s co-founder Alexis Ohanian told POLITICO.

The outcry from Internet users proved “that Americans actually still can dictate policy and not just lobbyists,” Ohanian said, during a visit to Washington this week. 

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The Silicon Empire Strikes Back

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Until this week, entertainment industry executives thought they had the votes for new federal legislation cracking down on foreign websites that traffic in pirated movies and music and cost them billions.

They lined up support from the powerful pharmaceutical industry and labor unions, and organized an impressive bipartisan coalition in Congress.

Then Silicon Valley struck back and appears to have outflanked Hollywood.
The result was on full display Tuesday night as Wikipedia,Craigslist and other popular sites shut down for a threatened 12- to 24-hour strike, said to be the Internet's first such stoppage. As many as 10,000 others had also threatened to go dark.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, said the strike was meant to protest the legislation's "frightening precedent of Internet censorship for the world." Visitors to Wikipedia's English-language site and others participating in the strike were met with a page urging them to write to Congress to oppose two proposed bills.

More from AP:

Wikipedia?

Inside Higher Ed has some surprising observations about Wikipedia:

The United States’ foremost custodian of public records had advice for professors whose colleagues still turn up their noses at Wikipedia.

"If all else fails, you can tell them, 'If it’s good enough for the archivist of the United States,' " said David Ferriero, who was appointed to the post in 2009, " 'we should at least take a look at it on campus.' "

Five years ago, many professors had pegged Wikipedia as a pariah. Now, four years into its first coordinated effort to recruit professors and students to its cause, Wikipedia’s overseers believe they have successfully recast the free, publicly edited encyclopedia as an ally of respectable scholarship.

Two dozen universities now have courses where students are working on Wikipedia as part of their formal coursework. Many of those campuses have “Wikipedia ambassadors” tasked with helping professors weave writing and editing Wikipedia entries into the syllabus. Even Ferriero’s office at the National Archives and Records Administration now employs a “Wikipedian in residence” in charge of fostering relationships with galleries, libraries, archives and museums.

Late last week, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the encyclopedia, took another step toward assuming the mantle of an accessory of higher education: it held an academic conference. The first-ever Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit convened professors who had incorporated Wikipedia into their teaching, as well as others who were considering doing so, to talk about pros and cons of assigning students to improve the publicly edited online encyclopedia.

The foundation also made it clear that Wikipedia plans to expand its relationship with academe.

When the foundation started recruiting professors several years ago for its Public Policy Initiative — an effort to improve articles relating to U.S. public policy — it already had its eye set on developing "mechanisms and systems that would enable us to systematically improve the coverage of any topic area," said Sue Gardner, executive director of Wikimedia.
...

But public scrutiny can be a double-edged sword, some professors noted. And acclimatizing students to the social and technical aspects of working on Wikipedia can be a “time-suck,” and might force professors to jettison parts of the syllabus more directly relevant to mastering course material.
...

"It is going take time for … students who are less tech-savvy to be able to move on," said Chris Cooper, associate professor of political science and public policy at Western Carolina.

Cooper said he did have to sacrifice parts of his syllabus and devote about two full class periods to teaching students the technical ins and outs of writing and editing in Wikipedia and communicating with other editors. Some students told him they would have liked more than that.

See this post for some additional cautions.

Good Research Advice

Wikipedia, which just celebrated its tenth birthday, has become a popular source for student research. Central Michigan Life reports:

Even people who use reference books should make sure the author is citing prominent thinkers in the field, said Chris Owens, assistant professor of political science, and using Wikipedia today is like using an encyclopedia was when he was in college.

“If you write a paper and it only has Wikipedia cites you’re going to get a bad grade,” he said. “There are plenty of electronic books and journals you can use.”

Owens said the source is useful for finding background on a topic but should be avoided for anything deeper. Novi sophomore Joe Betro uses Wikipedia for just that.

“I do (use it) in my reports, not to quote Wikipedia, but to find other reliable sources,” Betro said. “Most of my professors actually tell me to use it … as a jumping off point.”

...

It is up to each professor whether they allow Wikipedia as a source, Peters said. Owens and [historian Randy] Doyle do not allow their students to use the site as a source.

See here for more on the use of Wikipedia as a starting point instead of a citable source.

See here for broader advice on research.