Someone in Ireland updated the entry for Helix on wikipedia.

We’re a nation of saints and scholars, for sure.

If you are paying attention, you may have noticed certain glitches in the normally supreme service Jazz Biscuit offers.

BlogCCSearch (what is it?) and WikiCraic (what is that?) are now back online.

Groovy.

WikiCraic [it's on the right of this post], limited though it may be, is fun to refresh from time to time and see what’s hot on Wikipedia. Some enterprising person just edited Mary Robinson’s entry.

Have a look at the changes. Basically they changed ‘The Irish Times‘ ‘to ‘The Modern Gay Times‘ and ‘International Institute for Environment and Development‘ to ‘Dude, where’s my car for Environment and Development.’ Hilarious.

But what is incredible is that the vandalism was corrected within a minute. Which is why wikipedia always amazes me.

Original WikiCraic blog post.

If you look to your right you should see WikiCraic, a little program I wrote up.

What is it?
When it’s loaded [and you can reload it by hitting Check Again] it scans the Recent Changes page at Wikipedia for IP Addresses. It does a lookup to see if a particular IP Address is from the Irish range and if it is displays the page title and link.

Whose idea did you steal?
WikipediaVision is a much cooler app that does the above on a global scale, and then mashes the results up with Google maps for a really cool almost-realtime visualisation of anonymous edits going on all over the world. I liked the idea, but in a somewhat creepy way I’m much more interested in spying on my neighbours. So hence the idea was born. I read his FAQ to get an idea for how he did it, and then implemented it in PHP, using a screen scraper and the same offline GeoLocation database from MaxMind that WikipediaVision used.

Why does it only show anonymous edits?
Because wikipedia only displays the IP addresses of anonymous edits - the IPs of registered users are hidden.

Is it accurate?
I’m not entirely sure. I don’t know how accurate the MaxMind IP range data is. I don’t know a lot of things. Also, apparently there’s loads of quirks in the IP address ranges used by Irish people. e.g. Some NTL ones show up as UK.

Disclaimer
This is just for fun. And if the links on the right show something awful; then oh well that’s life, I accept no responsibility for the contents of those links.

Making it better.
You could actually set this up to run repeatedly and store the info in a database, so you could see edits flying around. It would be great for example, if someone was in the news, to see a huge upsurge in edits to his page. I’m not sure I like the idea of ripping data from wikipedia and storing it long term though.

Was this the best way to do this?
No idea. Maybe wikipedia has RSS feeds available by location, I don’t know. That’s not why I did it; it was just a fun exercise.

There you go. If it ends up being complete jazz I’ll remove it, but I hope it’ll throw up the occasional gem or random insight for whoever happens to see it.