IP Democracy: Wikipedia Shut Down House Access

A fabulous little brouhaha cropped up this week involving Wikipedia and several members of Congress (but one in particular). It seems that congressional staffers have been going into Wikipedia entries and editing out bad information regarding their bosses and inputting glowing commentary instead. (What a shock!)

It all started when The Lowell Sun ran an article on how someone on the staff of Representative Marty Meehan (D-MA) deleted from Meehan’s Wikipedia biography references to his broken pledge to stick to term limits and wiped out references to his massive campaign fund-raising.

It seems that Wikipedia was already wise to the Meehan edits and had in fact been investigating other suspicious edits made from the IP address through which all House of Representatives’ traffic flows. For one week in January, Wikipedia actually blocked House IP access.

“I’m not denying it,” Jon Brandt, a spokesman for the Committee on House Administration, which oversees the House computer network, said when asked to confirm House ownership of the address.

Wikinews has this wonderful, in-depth discussion of the whole situation, including a detailed list of all the IP addresses involved in the suspicious changes and chapter-and-verse run-downs of the changes made to each site. As it turns out, Senate staffers made questionable edits too.

While Wikinews just relays the facts of this imbroglio, Wikipedia founder Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales is quoted in an AP article as saying that removal of facts is wrong.

“You don’t delete it,” Wales said. “If they wanted to put in their side of things, that would seem ethically relevant, rather than just omitting it.”

Update: The Washington Post’s Yuki Noguchi has this front page piece on the Wikipedia “scandal” in Saturday’s print edition.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on February 3, 2006 9:10 AM to IP Democracy