The Lowell (Massachusetts) Sun last Friday ran an article about how congressional staffers have apparently been altering Wikipedia entries. “Rewriting history under the dome: Wikipedia alterations by staffers‿ details the more than 1,000 changes submitted by staffers to Wikipedia entries of specific legislators. The Wikipedia edits were traced to House and Senate IP addresses.
Late last year, according to the Sun, Wikipedia blocked users of the House’s IP address from changing content on the site because of violations described by the site as a "deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia."
Wikipedia has posted a request for comments – a policy intended to resolve content disputes. From the RFC:
The editors from this IP are rude and abrasive, immature, and show no understanding of Wikipedia policy. The editors also frequently try to whitewash the actions of frequent politicians. They treat Wikipedia articles about politicians as though they own it, replacing articles with their sanctioned biographies and engaging in revert wars when other users dispute this sudden change. They also violate Wikipedia:Verifiability, by deleting verified reports, while adding flattering things about members of Congress that they are unverified.
Check out the RFC talk page, where people post comments about the complaint. The list of edits is unbelievable.
The amazing thing is not that staffers were changing the language on their own legislator’s entry, or even that they changed someone else’s entry, but that the staffers may have thought their actions couldn’t be traced. Don't these people read the news?
The really sad part is that even if most of this nonsense was propogated by pages and interns (as opposed to career staffers) as one comment suggests, everyone gets painted with the same brush.
View Comments
Very interesting... as always! Cheers from -Switzerland-.
Posted by Whatever-ishere on November 27, 2007 - 07:31 AM
To post a comment, you must be a registered user of FCW.com and be logged in. Use one of the forms below to login or register for FREE to FCW.com. To protect your privacy, you can use an alias as your username.
