United States Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia
Some edits to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia by staff of the United States Congress have created controversy, notably in early to mid-2006. Several such instances, such as those involving Marty Meehan, Norm Coleman, Conrad Burns, and Joe Biden, received significant media attention. Others, such as those involving Gil Gutknecht, were reported but received less widespread coverage.
Biographical information on various politicians was edited by their own staff to remove undesirable information, add favorable information or "glowing" tributes, add negative information to opponents' biographies, or replace the article in part or whole by staff-authored biographies.
Background
On January 27, 2006, The Sun of Lowell, Massachusetts, published an article entitled "Rewriting history under the dome", which revealed the editing by Congressional staff members of Representative Marty Meehan's Wikipedia entry.Further investigation by Wikipedia editors discovered over a thousand es allocated to either the House of Representatives or the Senate. Wikipedia editors found that most of the edits were considered to be in good faith, but a minority of edits were considered improper. At least one of the addresses involved was prohibited from further editing.
Incidents
Norm Coleman
Later in January 2006, Senator Norm Coleman's chief of staff, Erich Mische, verified that Coleman's staffers had edited his page "to correct inaccuracies and delete information." Mische stated: "What's to stop someone from writing in that Norm Coleman was 7 feet 10 inches, with green hair and one eye smack dab in the middle of his head? That's about as silly as this gets When you put 'edia' in there, it makes it sound as if this is a benign, objective piece of information."Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said, "It appears to be a major rewrite of the article to make it more favorable."
Joe Biden
The Wikipedia investigation found that Biden staffers had removed and modified descriptions of incidents of alleged plagiarism and had recast discussion of a possible Biden 2008 presidential candidacy in a more favorable light. In February 2006, The Washington Post quoted Biden spokesperson Norm Kurz as saying that the changes that were "made to Biden's site by this office were designed to make it more fair and accurate."Gil Gutknecht
On August 16, 2006, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune reported that the office of Representative Gil Gutknecht tried twice—on July 24 and August 14, 2006—to remove a 128-word section in the Wikipedia article on him, replacing it with a more flattering 315-word entry from his official congressional biography. Gutknecht's office used the account "Gutknecht01" for the first edits on July 24, which was then notified of Wikipedia policies against self-editing. For the second set of edits on August 16, his office used an anonymous Congressional IP address.Most of the removed text was about the 12-year term limit Gutknecht imposed on himself in 1995, as Gutknecht had run for re-election in 2006. He broke his promise and was subsequently defeated, though not specifically as a result of this pledge. A spokesman for Gutknecht did not dispute that his office tried to change his Wikipedia entry, but questioned the reliability of the encyclopedia.
U.S. Rep. David Davis and Tennessee Rep. Matthew Hill
In August 2007, U.S. Rep. David Davis's press secretary Timothy Hill at first denied—and later acknowledged, during a second press interview with the Knoxville News Sentinel—that he had used a congressional office computer and resources to edit Wikipedia in June 2007. His edits were to delete blocks of information about his employer and his brother Tennessee Representative Matthew Hill from their respective Wikipedia biographies. The information that was deleted "concerned political contributions to both his brother and Davis by former King Pharmaceuticals CEO John Gregory, as well as other ties to the Gregory family."U.S. Rep Mike Pence
In August 2011, The Huffington Post reported that the office of then-Indiana representative Mike Pence appeared to have edited Pence's Wikipedia page to make the representative look more flattering.Edward Snowden
On August 2, 2013, an editor using an IP address linked to the U.S. Senate edited the Wikipedia page of whistleblower Edward Snowden to change his description from "dissident" to "traitor".On August 5, 2014, an editor using an IP address linked to the U.S. House of Representatives edited the Wikipedia page of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, to describe Edward Snowden as an "American traitor."
Laverne Cox
On August 21, 2014, an editor using an IP address linked to the U.S. House of Representatives edited the page on the Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black to describe actress Laverne Cox as a "real man pretending to be a woman."Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture
On December 9 and 10, 2014, an anonymous user using edited the article on the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, removing a sentence characterizing the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" as "torture."Kavanaugh hearings
In September 2018, an anonymous editor from Congress posted the personal information of several Republican senators into their articles, leading to CongressEdits, a bot which posts edits to Wikipedia from IP addresses located in Congressional offices, being banned from Twitter.On September 27, the for "Devil's Triangle" was edited from a House of Representatives IP address to describe it as a drinking game, matching the testimony of Kavanaugh.
Congressional edits
The Wikimedia system has responded in at least three ways to questionable edits. The most obvious response is case-by-case, based on the "watch" button at the top of each article: A user who sets that switch can get emails when that article is changed. Another is an occasional block. At least some of these are documented in.For edits from IP addresses associated with the U.S. Congress, Ed Summers also created a Twitter feed to notify the world of any changes made from those addresses: @congressedits was an automated Twitter account from 2014 to 2018 that tweeted anonymous changes to Wikipedia articles that originated from IP addresses belonging to the United States Congress. The changes were presumed to have been made by the staffs of US elected representatives and senators.
Prior to the Twitter feed, the best information about what congressional staffers were editing was found in the present article on U.S. Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia and in the, both of which are manually updated.