Anonymous Israeli Wikipedia Edits

this is work in progress

Introduction

How active and in what way are Israeli present on Wikipedia? Given the Israeli IP range(s) and the Wikiscanner, what could be said about the interests of Israeli web users, as expressed on the English language Wikipedia? In this research the Wikiscanner is queried for anonymous Wikipedia edits from within the Israeli IP ranges. The Wikiscanner is a tool that allows querying of IP(range)s to discover what anonymous edits where made by a specific IP(range), amongst other Wikipedia detective work.

Method

First a list of IP ranges for Israel was obtained by querying and parsing the RIPE allocation list and dnsstuff.com. The derived data was then translated to a format suitable for the Wikiscanner (e.g. 212.106.64.0/19 becomes 212.106.64-95.0-255) and the wikiscanner was queried for all ranges found. Various queries to Wikiscanner resulted in a list of anonymous Wikipedia edits from IP addresses in the specified ranges. The list consists of an IP, the title of the Wikipedia entry that was edited, the revision number of the Wikipedia article when it was edited from the IP, the comment which was added to the edit, and the time and date at which the edit took place. The list was made sortable so one can easily make a time line, see which IP's are most active and which titles are edited a lot. As the list consists of 15871 edits, further abstraction seemed necessary. Therefor tag clouds were generated which depict a) the frequency of edits for the titles, b) the frequency of edits per IP address, and c) the amount of comments which are the same.

Tools

• Analyse and compare lists (of ip ranges)
• Wikiscanner
• Sortable list generator
• Tag cloud generator

Result visualizations

• Sortable list (35M) of anonymous Wikipedia edits in the Israeli IP range. When the page has completely loaded it is possible to click on the column headings to sort on that column. Give it some time, sorting is done client side through Javascript. The faster your machine, the faster it will sort.
• Ordered tag cloud of the frequency of edits per Title, the frequency of edits per IP address, and the amount of comments which are the same. Screen shots of the top results can be seen here:

Findings

Between December 2, 2003 and August 3, 2007, en.wikipedia.org was anonymously edited 15871 times from within the Israeli IP range. In this period 8725 different titles were edited, 5065 IPs have participated in the editing, and 3963 different comments were made.

From the following table it can be seen that there are 96 power users with more than 20 edits per IP. The majority of edits per IP however is smaller than 5. Before drawing conclusions from this, one has to take into account that a user might get a different (dynamic) IP each time s/he logs on. Table: edits per IP address

# of edits per IP	amount of IPs
1	2764
2	962
3	428
4	263
>= 5 < 10	383
>=10 < 20	170
>= 20 < 30	39
>= 30 < 40	21
>= 40 < 50	10
>= 50 < 100	20
>= 100 < 200	4
>= 200	1

The quality of edits differs between the topics. Although there was no time yet to study how certain pages were edited, some illustrative results are described below:

• More than half of the edits have been made without comments.
• Of those edits that have been commented upon, adding references and links, and adding/changing bits of history and biography seem important to those in the Israeli IP range.

Following table shows the number of anonymous en.wikipedia.org edits per month from within the Israeli IP range

month	# of edits
	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007
Jan	n/a	0	81	384	455	723
Feb	1	0	55	109	409	493
Mar	1	0	68	111	371	628
Apr	0	0	61	155	345	580
May	1	9	113	254	466	526
Jun	0	8	89	228	466	586
Jul	1	22	162	321	619	674
Aug	0	21	219	386	695	95
Sep	0	5	193	286	644	n/a
Oct	2	10	239	341	637	n/a
Nov	3	6	260	322	793	n/a
Dec	1	32	182	363	660	n/a

Future Research

• Carry out the same research for the Hebrew Wikipedia.
• The IP addresses could easily be mapped geographically to find out where in the Israeli territories the edits were made.
• Add http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedians_in_Israel and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Israeli_Wikipedians

Additional Research

• Carry out the same research for the Israeli IP ranges. See which articles in the English version of Wikipedia entries are edited by both Israeli and Palestinian web users. See ComparisonBetweenAnonymousPalestinianAndIsraeliWikipediaEdits

---

Tags:

archive1 israel1 tag cloud generator1 wikiscanner1 create new tag

, view all tags