A few months ago, I forked and launched a Twitter bot. The original bot that I forked from was called @congressedits and was developed by Ed Summers.
Congress edits was a lovely little bot that tweeted out edits to Wikipedia pages. It would only tweet if the editor was coming from an IP address associated with the US congress and if the edit was done without logging in, or anonymously.
Unfortunately, @congressedits was shut down on Twitter because someone included personally identifiable information in an anonymous Wikipedia edit. Tweeting that out is a violation of Twitter’s policy.
I spent some time trying to figure out if I could get public IP addresses associated with San Francisco government but ultimately decided it might not even be worth it. Living in San Francisco, I’m not as worried about government employees making anonymous edits to random pages that aren’t really related to our city.
Instead, @FriscoEdits watches a specific list of pages connected to institutions and politicians in San Francisco and tweets out any edits, whether they’re made anonymously or not.
I’ll keep working on the bot over time and may do something similar for other institutions. If you have any suggestions for pages to add to the watch list, comment here or DM @FriscoEdits on Twitter.