The America Rising PAC is the Republican Party’s counterpart to American Bridge. Its plans include “cataloging every Democrat utterance,” a task that involves tracking statements and appearances in a database. Candidates now know that every public appearance they make (and some private ones) will be recorded and parsed for anything that might be politically useful to opponents.

There is at least one significant exception to this rule, however: congressional websites, which have no real-time archive and update frequently enough to make the task of tracking changes difficult. The Library of Congress has a series of web archiving collections, including some for prior Congresses, but even that effort captures only monthly snapshots of what lawmakers post. The Wikipedia effort, on the other hand, makes use of that site’s API coding, which gives programmers a consistent interface to the site’s information. It is also why an account like @congressedits has popped up, along with imitators in other countries.

The House of Representatives, the Senate and the Library of Congress do not have a similar feature, so automatically tracking legislative actions such as a bill’s progress requires knowing about the legislative process and where to look or a reliance on third-party sites.

The creator of @congressedits, a software developer named Ed Summers, wrote that creating the account reinforced his belief that people wanted more information about their democracies. Rather than focus on the current edits, he proposed extending the idea: “Imagine if our elected representatives and their staffers logged in to Wikipedia, identified much like Dominic McDevitt-Parks (a federal employee at the National Archives) and used their knowledge of the issues and local history to help make Wikipedia better?”