kissane

The Apparatus of CongressEdits

Sometimes you write a piece of software and it gets used for purposes you didn't quite imagine at the time. Sometimes you write a piece of software and it unexpectedly rearranges your life. I'd like to tell you a quick story about [a Twitter bot named @CongressEdits][congressedits]. It tweets when someone edits Wikipedia anonymously from the United States Congress. In this post I'll give you some background on how the bot came to be, what it has been used for so far, and how it works. @CongressEdits taught me how the world of archives intersects with the world of politics and journalism. To explain how that happened, I first need to give a bit of background.

Wikipedia

According to [Alexa][alexa], [wikipedia.org][wikipedia] is the sixth most popular destination on the Web. Wikipedia is, of course, the encyclopedia anyone can edit, so long as you can stomach [wikitext][wikitext] and revert wars. Wikipedia is also a platform for [citizen journalism][citizen_journalism], w

kissane

Style Book

We're currently using the Chicago Manual of Style. It's imperfect, but it's better than the alternatives, so far.

Style Basics & Deviations From the Stylebook

• We don't wrap article titles within text in quotes, but we do link to them on first usage
• We don't italicize the names of publications in article text
• We don't cap "The" in publication titles in article text, but we do in Organization entries
• Commas and periods go inside closing quotation marks

kissane

Style Book

We're currently using Chicago, but we can switch to AP if there's a good reason. (Like, say, Chicago annoying our entire readership.)

Style Basics & Deviations From the Stylebook

• We don't wrap article titles within text in quotes, but we do link to them on first usage
• We don't italicize the names of publications in article text
• We don't cap "The" in publication titles in article text, but we do in Organization entries
• Commas and periods go inside closing quotation marks