Some of you may be aware of (or even involved in) some of the political tug of war that has been going on at Wikipedia where even the seemingly most innocuous topic can be the subject of Wiki POV flame editing, well this story has an added twist.
It seems that entries that have to do with particular members of Congress are being furiously edited - especially to make certain information more palpable. But is even more interesting is how the people at Wiki found who was doing the editing. It seems that people at Wikepedia sent emails to staffers on Capital Hill and when those emails where responded to, the IP addresses could be linked to various Congress offices - and the editing could be traced.
Bwahh, ha, ha, ha.
The article that came out yesterday, Feb 7th, goes into detail:
http://en.wikinews.org/...
Scroll down to the bottom of the half of this article:
http://en.wikinews.org/...
One interesting part of this story is the investigative moxy and knowledge of the Wiki people unlike "real" journalists.
...The U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms owns the IP block 156.33.0.0 to 156.33.255.255. Requests to learn the mapping of these thousands of IPs were not responded to at press time. However, the lower 100 blocks of addresses appear to be mapped to the 100 Senators based on their state's alphabetical listing. This was partially confirmed using e-mail responses from the offices of Senators; where the originating computer was connected to the network directly and was not a part of block 222 (a section which seems to be reserved for servers), the IP addresses matched the predicted pattern.
Meaning that Wiki entries about legislation from a certain state, say Florida, could be directly linked to offices of Florida Senators.
And some of the edits are extremely funny and ... embarrassing:
Norm Coleman's office deleted references that he voted with Bush 98% of the time and that Karl Rove was the one that convinced him to run for the Senate instead of Governor.
Of course both Republicans and Democrats "staffers" are furiously spending their time scrubbing Wikipedia, but it is interesting to see what members of Congress see as potentially embarrassing. For instance, there has been quite of bit of deleting by Congress offices that link them to Tom Delay - I wonder why that might be.
This was strange also concerning the beloved Conrad Burns
References, citations, and description of Conrad Burns' use of the word 'ragheads' and legislation that would reduce native american tribal sovereignty that Burns co-sponsored were removed from Wikipedia's article, replaced by a paragraph titled "A Voice for the Farmer". The citations supported the discussion of Senator Burns's legislative record regarding tribal sovereignty.
Other great quotes...
Jeez, you'll see there that IP 143.231.249.141 (from once again, the House of bad Rep IP range) decided facts are pesky and so unnecessary in this day and age. Congressman Dan Lungren (R-CA) just doesn't think anyone should focus on the fact that he only "received 38% of the vote." Why focus on the negative? Hopefully Lungren can go back into that article some more and shiny it up till it makes us all feel more positive and happy.
(And this was very strange)
I have "Edits seemingly coming from Rick Santorum's staff members that removed a reference to an effort to redefine Santorum's last name as a neologism meaning "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex" were removed." into the miscellaneous section.
All in all, it's good to see our Congress staffers busy at work...