In today's Washington Post, a piece by Yuki Noguchi about the recent sneaky edits of numerous Wikipedia entries by congresscritters and/or their peons. Snip:
This is what passes for an extreme makeover in Washington: A summer intern for seven-term Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.) altered the congressman's profile on the Wikipedia Web site to remove an old promise that he would limit his service to four terms. Someone doctored Sen. Robert C. Byrd's (D-W.Va.) profile on the site to list his age as 180. (He is 88.) An erroneous entry for Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) claimed that he "was voted the most annoying senator by his peers in Congress."
Last week, Wikipedia temporarily blocked certain Capitol Hill Web addresses from altering any entries in the otherwise wide-open forum.
(…) Washington has posed a special problem for Wikipedia, which is monitored by 800 to 1,000 active editor-volunteers. In the recent flare-up, a community of Wikipedia editors read a story in the Lowell Sun newspaper in which staffers for Meehan acknowledged replacing an entry on him with more flattering verbiage. That prompted last week's Capitol Hill Wikipedia blackout; all computers connected to servers at the House of Representatives, identified by a numerical Web address, were denied access.
Link.
Call me blonde, but here's what I still don't understand: Meehan's summer intern wasn't the only congressional staffer editing their bosses' (or possibly their own) Wikipedia entries in a less-than-transparent, non-NPOV way. So has anyone (investigating journos, or Wikipedians) tried tracing those "certain" IP addresses or conducting other forensics to see who else behaved badly?
Reader comment: Andrew Gray says,
The problem is that the IP in question for most of the "famous" edits was 143.231.249.141 – this resolves to housegate10.house.gov, and is, I believe, a proxy through which huge chunks of the House's traffic passes. My understanding is that Meehan got identified because someone guessed it was his office – the edits to his page were pretty clear whitewashing – and they owned up when challenged; any other congressman would be much trickier to pick out.
There's a detailed study of all the IPs identified as House or Senate here, which might be of interest, but again it doesn't seem easy to identify individuals for sure.
