US Congress staff sabotage Wikipedia

international | sci-tech | other press Tuesday January 31, 2006 18:21 by R. Isible

Paid trolls at work

Employees of members of the US Congress have been revealed to have been engaging in unethical behaviour on the collaborative online encylopedia "Wikipedia".

Wikipedia [1] is a Free online encylopedia whose content is generated by its users. As anyone can create, edit and modify an article it is inevitable that there are conflicts and disagreements on some controversial topics. Sometimes a cycle of destructive editing and counter editing takes place (known as a "revert war"), even though there are ways for the concerned parties to discuss the content and reach a resolution.

It has been revealed that thousands of entries mostly relating to inconvenient and/or embarassing details of elected representatives have been purged by people with IP addresses that have been traced back to people in the employ of members of the House of Representatives.

Wikipedia is dealing [2] with the situation and the exposure of this behaviour is a further embarassment to the guilty parties. It's instructive in showing how far the "people's representatives" will go in trying to maintain control of information -- and don't believe it's just limited to the USA.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/United_States_Congress