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

kissane

The Daily Emerald's normal homepage is a basic three-column layout using Twitter's Bootstrap: posts in chronological order on the left, featured stories in the center, ads on the right. Weeks ago we talked about doing something different for the Fiesta Bowl. The first plan was to make a full-width well below the menu bar and push the rest of the page down ~400-700 pixels. It probably would've been a big picture, a Twitter embed and some related stories. A bit different, but not particuarly exciting.

Fast forward to last Wednesday, when we decided to try to build a "second screen" for the game. What do fans want that we can make? Maybe they want to see what the each other's saying, talk about the game, read a reporter's account, read stories about the game. We've done each of these things independently, so this was essentially a repackaging of those components. (It's also the first time I've seen a homepage on DailyEmerald.com that isn't a print-y layout translated to web. I think