Tuesday, January 31, 2006

More Problems for Wikipedia

According to Slashdot, Congressional staffers are altering Wikipedia articles on various members of Congress to portray those individuals in a more positive (and very biased!) light.

What has Wikipedia done to fix this? Blocked the U.S. Congress IP address range for a week until they can figure out a better solution.

Poor Wikipedia. They just can't get a break. First the "false Wikipedia 'biography'" and now this. Can't people just add content to Wikipedia as Wikipedia intended?

To be fair, it seems that many edits by Congressional staffers have actually been helpful (see the article at TG Daily)- correcting things such as spelling and incorrect information. There are just a few bad eggs out there. The name that seems to be surfacing a lot is U.S. Rep Marty Meehan (see the Lowell Sun Online article), whose staffers have been having some fun with his Wikipedia entry.

4 comments:

Jeff said...

funny you should mention. i have a funny wikipedia story that i was going to blog about today, but it will probably wait until tomorrow. and by "funny," i mean "funny to me."

Kate said...

I've been checking your blog eagerly today for this funny Wikipedia story, Nye!, but I haven't seen it yet!

Jeff said...

coming soon, i swear. been a little bogged down the last couple of days.

Anonymous said...

Hehehe : ) I hadn't heard of that! But I'm on wikipedia usually once a day, and never had problems - although it was rather slow at some point. Maybe they only blocked the House staffers?