Wikipedia Entries 'Cleaned' By Political Staffers

worb writes "According to the Lowell Sun, U.S. Rep Marty Meehan's staff has been heavily editing his Wikipedia bio, among other things removing criticisms. In total, more than one thousand Wikipedia edits in various articles have been traced back to congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six months."

Wikipedians expose the "congressional edits"

You can have a look at how some of them were revealed in the talk page for rep. Marty Meehan (D) [wikipedia.org]. There's even a big list of entries edited by a specific IP address, with the comment:

"These edits range from benificial and informative to libelous and childish."

Re:Wikipedians expose the "congressional edits"

> "These edits range from benificial and informative to libelous and childish."

That pretty much sums up Wikipedia

Re:Wikipedians expose the "congressional edits"

That pretty much sums up our house of represenatives.

(me thinks its just an underlying meme of the human condition)

Mudslinging

This isn't as bad as some profane articles I found some congressional aides/staffers writing about each other... which was confirmed by their senate IP addresses...

It's the done thing.

Wikipedia is open for potential abuses like these, but then again Wiki has always been a good reflection of society, and this is precisely what political agents do with the rest of society/PR outlets.

not just him....

they've been busy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:143.231.249.141 [wikipedia.org]

Re:not just him....

Busy, but banned :) "This IP has been blocked It belongs to Information Systems, U.S. House of Representatives Has vandalised many times." Looks like some pretty serious stuff they're trying to get away with, if you take a look at the list

At least the errors are being caught.

As flawed as the Wikipedia system might be, at least it is known to all what sort of errors are being made.

Anyone with an ounce of intelligence could use the list you posted a link to to their advantage. Chances are that if Republicans are adding material to an article, such information is likely a lie. Likewise, if they're removing information, it is probably truthful information they wish to hide from the public. Likewise for the Democrats.

unfortunately

this is what you have to accept with a democratic ideal like Wikipedia. Much like a real democracy, you might not like what you see, but you have to live with it. Wikipedia is a similar process, except that individuals get a WHOLE LOT more say in the process. And if you bring in guards, who will guard the guards? (and don't say meta-guards, PLEASE!) If this bothers you, do some research, edit the article yourself and play the editing war with that politician's staff.

Re:unfortunately

No, Wikipedia is more like anarchy, where any one person can shout over anyone else, overwhelming the majority with rhetoric. Any one person can modify any entry on Wikipedia. It has its pros and its cons. Unfortunately this sort of thing where politicians (Scumbag politicians of BOTH extremes) use Wikipedia to mislead voters who might want to research voting records and positions on issues. The ultimate result of this will be that the greatest stregth of Wikipedia - peer editing - will be lost forever, just because a few assholes abuse it for their own personal gain.

With that said: I always try to vote against incumbents.

Yeah, this is news.

Coming up after the break, we'll have the weather, and Tom will present his special report, "Are All Politicians Scumbags?" The answer may surprise you. But first, is your computer rotting your brain? You may be dead and not even know it yet.

--------- (I apologize if this is too high concept. I sick, and my head is floaty. It feels right, but right now I have terrible judgement.)

That's the power and the weakness of Wikipedia

It can be edited by everybody. Including the "Congressional staffers". Why is it "censorship"?

Re:That's the power and the weakness of Wikipedia

By reading the page history, and encouraging other users to do so. I think Wikipedia should have a little notation in the heading that shows the number of edits in the past little while, and allows you to quickly view them - perhaps merged into the same document.

Would you?

Well. I'm not suprised. But really if you found a page about yourself in the wikipedia full of critisisms you would think about changing them. Really with a world where comments can be changed they probably will be.

Although having people doing this for seems a bit of misuse of resourses.

Could you honsitly say you wouldn't be tempted to change things critisising about you if you could.

With the power to change things to the way one would want them one would.

Very simple solution

From the Wikipedia entry:

In January 2006, Matt Vogel, Meehan's chief of staff, admitted to authorizing a replacement article on Meehan published on Wikipedia, with an approved and sanitized staff-written biography [1] [2]. This ran afoul of internal Wikipedia guidelines [3], and government ethics' rules on the use of employee time.

The simple thing to do: fire Matt Vogel. If the Representative simply turns a blind eye to this sort of activity, then it is indicative of how he feels about ethical questions and what he thinks about the place of informed public debate in a republican form of government.

With Members of Congress like this about information on themselves, is it any wonder nobody there disclosed information on the warrantless wiretaps?

Sensitivities

I realize some information is a lot more sensitive than others, but exactly, then, WHO is supposed to edit this information? Isn't this the point of the whole wikipedia excercise? I mean, it is hardly a headline when musicians edit entries about musical intruments, even when a violinist edits an entry adding a comment about the 'harsh tone' of brass instruments. The brass players need to come in and correct their own entries.

By the same model, politicians are probably going to be the ones editing the entries about politics. If a politician doesn't like his own entry, he should get in there and fix it (or tell his staffers to). If entries become too volitile, they will trigger other wikipedia policies.

Frankly, I think the 'meta moderation' of these entries is interesting political infotmation itself. I think the article itself should have some header or hilighting ranking its volatility - I would be more likely to 'trust' stable entries.

best line in wikitalk pages for this (House) IP

It's a sad day when we have to treat a House IP the same way we treat an AOL one. [wikipedia.org]

Read down, from the beginning of the talk for that IP. It's like a sad soap opera. Noone there knows anything about how they're being observed/tracked, or IP addresses, or wikipedia, or NPOV, or, really, anything.

Look at about 1/2 of the Reps' pages

About half of the pages look like press releases. On the other hand, a lot of the pages acquire a lot of unsubstantiated rumor mongering, and I don't have a problem with the Rep's staffs keeping an eye on people making false or unsubstantiated claims on the site.

The moral of this story

What's so awesome about wikipedia is that even after editing, the original information is still available. That being the case, part of one's research (especially when dealing with people of the political persuasion), should include past versions. At least this way, those seeking information can get the whole story, regardless of any sanitizing efforts by those in office.

Wikipedia's system works

Here is the talkpage of the article. [wikipedia.org]

I usually check the discusion of a wikipedia article to check if it biased. Usually there is a group of editors dedicated to the subject who pay a lot of attention to the article, along with vandals and stray people who just felt like adding some of their knowledge. Pretty interesting to have people with opposing views edit an article. I am not saying they are all like this, just the good ones. When they disagree enough a flag will go up. When there isn't an opposing view there is a problem, no one would question what goes in.

Something interesting, the wikipedia article on google is way more critical of google than the microsoft article is of microsoft.

Re:Wikipedia need a serious fix!

Actually, for technical issues Wikipedia articles seem to be ok -- people who write articles are people who care, and thus they usually have reasonable expertise. As a mathematician I can say that the Math articles are quite reasonable. Still can replace MathWorld [wolfram.com], but if you need a definition you can look it up. Physics articles are not quite as good, mostly because of popular influences (tend to discuss popular controversies), but are rather reliable. Politics is a different kettle of fish -- because people have a stake and are rather more biased.

Re:Wikipedia need a serious fix!

If it can be done, do it. No, really. Wikipedia's content (ALL OF IT) is under a license that lets you use it as long as you still retain the attribution to wikipedia.
The software it runs on is free, the content is free, all you have to do it duplicate it and then apply whatever silly editing rules you think will fix the problems with wikipedia.

Hell, someone has even written a tutorial on setting up your own copy of wikipedia. [wikinerds.org]
Do that, and you can edit it however you want, with whatever rules you want. It'll be just like wikipedia, but you can change the rules!
Oh, but you won't have wikipedia's legion of editors! Your copy won't really as good as wikipedia without that, will it?
Oh, wait. Maybe that's why wikipedia is as big as it is... because of the editing rules! Many other rules have been tried. Wikipedia is as big as it is because THESE RULES WORK. But go ahead and set up a copy with your rules. If it's better than wikipedia, people will use it as much as they use wikipedia now.

But I rather doubt you'll be able to convince the wikipedia community to change the very things that make wikipedia wikipedia, but you're welcome to try. Anyone can edit, after all.
For now, at least. We'll see if that's still true after you explain your amazing scheme to fix wikipedia.

Re:Democrats, Republicans: the same thing!

(Edited Sunday January 29, 03:26PM by RonPaul)

It's easy to see the edits.

But you do know who used it last, and what specifically they changed. It's extremely easy to compare different versions of the same article. You can even be shown exactly what text differs between the two, for instance.

So rather than suggesting it's a flaw that anyone can change the most recent copy of the information, we need to realize that it's beneficial that we can see past edits, and who performed them.

Indeed, if we see a trend of certain information being edited out of articles about Republicans, it could be quite safe to assume the information that was removed is completely valid, and is being removed because it is the unfortunate truth. The same would go for the Democrats, or basically any other group, for instance. At least, however, we can see what was changed, and what it was changed from. That's just as beneficial as the information itself.

Who said getting reliable information was easy?

Who ever said that getting the whole picture was easy or quick? It's your whole attitude of consulting some other "trusted" source, rather than investigating the matter on your own, which leads to people being easily manipulated.

Unfortunately, that happened to many Americans during the run-up to the ongoing war in Iraq. Most Americans didn't investigate the claims made by politicians and the media, and thus were ignorant to the fact that they were being seriously mislead.