ACTA/diffs/Tutorial for helping with comparing ACTA-leaks

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Written by agent x-cong for the Department of Defense, United States of Internets.

Contents

Introduction

This tutorial is supposed to contain the information needed for you to learn how to help with manually comparing texts at the EUwiki.

Important web sites

Overview

  • Tratten is a project for collecting data about the texts that circulate in the european parliament and its vincinity.
  • Pippilongstrings is a project for creating a program for automatically finding differences or similarities between legaslative texts, in order to simplify our efforts.

When legaslative texts are leaked, such as ACTA, they need to first be transcribed into a machine readable format. Transcription is generally a manual task, unless one is lucky enough for OCR to work.

When one has access to a machine readable format of a legaslative text it is somewhat simple to compare it with other machine readable legaslative texts. Since Pippilongstrings is not operational at the moment we need to do this comparision by hand.

When dealing with the leaked ACTA texts, the most interesting part is how the different versions compare to each other. If we find the answer to that question, we can monitor how the treaty changes over time. The involved parties (nations/corporations/EU) has not yet agreed on what the content of ACTA is supposed to be, and they are currently debating over replacing words such as "May" with "Shall". The differences between the leaked ACTA documents reveal how the process of negotiating ACTA develops. This is important information for many internauts as it gives us a deeper understanding of ACTA.

Tutorial (How to do it manually)

First, visit ACTA/diffs and try to get some sort of overview of how it might work. There are multiple versions of ACTA, which has been catalouged by their leak dates. For each one of the most recently leaked documents, each and every chapter is compared in order to reveal developments in the treaty. For example, in the section named "CHAPTER ONE" there are links to JANUARY v. APRIL, APRIL v. JULY and JULY v. AUGUST. These all links to comparisons of different versions of the same page. If you look at history of the page you see it more clearly: http://euwiki.org/index.php?title=ACTA/diffs/Chapter1&action=history

What we wish to do is to compare each and every chapter and track the changes that has been made over time.

But before you contribute, you need to sign up for an account.

In order to contribute, click one of the unfinished comparisons that are linked from ACTA/diffs. This will take you to a special page that shows the difference between versions of that same wiki article.

You will notice that some versions are marked as perhaps "ACTA/20100701_leak" while others are marked "ACTA/WashingtonDC_aug25". BOTH VERSIONS EXIST IN THE SAME WIKI PAGE. The comments are used to keep track of which version is which.

What you do is that you try to remove as much as possible of the potential spelling errors that has been introduced by internauts that has manually transcribed the photocopies of the document into machine readable text. You also need to remove the useless empty lines that might have been introduced in the text. Generally, you need to make the two versions look as much as each other as possible, and then use the comparision function in the wiki to highlight the difference.

So, to sum it up:

  • In the EUwiki there are articles that are used only for comparing the text of chapters between different ACTA versions. When one clicks the "history" one will see that the article has versions named after the ACTA leaks. What we are doing is that we are comparing the different versions of the same wiki article, thus comparing the texts from the ACTA leaks.

Each time you make a change in the text ( I M P O R T A N T )

  • Remember which version you are editing. If the comment was "ACTA/WashingtonDC_aug25" then your edited version should also be given the comment "ACTA/WashingtonDC_aug25". Do not confuse which version is which!
  • Do never remove any important text. Only work with the formatting of the text.
  • The comparision function in the wiki will not always work. If too much text differ the comparator will go nuts and mark everything below a certain point red. If you insert a specific pattern into the versions you are editing (currently 3,1415... is used) you can make the comparator back on track again. Inserting pi into the text (in both versions) after a block of text that severely mismatched you can make the comparator work again.
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