Members of Congress may want to
check if their staffers are actually hard at work on their
computers, because a few people (but mostly one prolific
individual) seem to spend their days trolling Wikipedia. Today, the
site has been edited at about 20 times by people with congressional
IP addresses.
And one person, who has made about
30 edits in the last 48 hours, has been focusing on some
politicized topics, like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, the Cato
Institute, and many others.
Under the IP address 143.231.249.138 (which has apparently been
blocked in the past for
“disruptive edits”), he (or she) today changed an entry about
Snowden,
calling him an “American traitor who defected to Russia.”
Regarding Manning, the user took to the talk page,
asking, “Why is this man referred to throughout the article by
his alias? He is much more well-known under his real name.” As far
the Cato Institute goes, the individual added the fact that the
policy institute is hosting a talk about
congressional staff editing Wikipedia.
Interestingly, the individual has gotten his fingers in the
pages of libertarian-leaning congressmen Justin Amash and Thomas
Massie. Arguably, he’s made their pages more neutral, albeit less
informative, changing a description of Amash from
“corporate lawyer” to simply “an attorney,” and
removing the fact that Massie supports the ending federal
gun-free zones in schools.
For what it’s worth, it seems this prolific John Doe may be
a Russian-speaker
and has a fixation on Russia Today anchor Abby Martin,
writing that she’s not a journalist but a “propagandist,” but
also
adding her name to a list of psychedelic artists (she really does dabble,
apparently). He makes other legitimate, if obscure, additions to
Wikipedia, like information on the congressional
chicken caucus and peanut caucus.
John Doe also recently rewrote Mediaite‘s page,
calling it a “sexist transphobic” media outlet for “that
automatically assum[ing] that someone is male without any
evidence.” Shortly thereafter, on July 24, Wikipedia began a 10-day
ban on edits from Congressional computers.
The site has been dealing with “vandalism” from congressional
computers
basically since the beginning.
Ed Summers, a software developer who started a Twitter account
called “@CongressEdits” that
automatically tweets all of the changes, has said,
“Imagine if our elected representatives and their
staffers logged in to Wikipedia… and used
their knowledge of the issues and local history to help make
Wikipedia better?”
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has criticized CongressEdits,
saying
that “there is a belief from some of the [Wikipedia] community that
it only provoked someone—some prankster there in the office—to have
an audience now for the pranks, and actually encouraged them rather
than discouraged them.” To be fair, so did banning them and
creating media hype in the first place.
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