Congressman rewriting history

Lowell Sun Online – Home

This is an interesting article if you care how Wikipedia is getting their information.

Online ‘encyclopedia’ allows anyone to edit entries, and congressional staffers do just that to bosses’ bios
By EVAN LEHMANN, Sun Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat on a Web site that bills itself as the “world’s largest encyclopedia,” The Sun has learned.

The Meehan alterations on Wikipedia.com represent just two of more than 1,000 changes made by congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month. Wikipedia is a global reference that relies on its Internet users to add credible information to entries on millions of topics.

I find it interesting that so many Whitehouse IP’s are getting snared when they alter Wikipedia. Especially since so many people use it for references in their blogs and research. Personally, I will never cite Wikipedia as a source again, but how many people don’t realize what’s going on? I guess “The Sun” isn’t a Repub publication or this would have never been printed.

The change deleted a reference to Meehan’s campaign promise to surrender his seat after serving eight years, a pledge Meehan later eschewed. It also deleted a reference to the size of Meehan’s campaign account, the largest of any House member at $4.8 million, according to the latest data available from the Federal Election Commission.

“Meehan first ran for Congress in 1992 on a platform of reform,” the pre-edited entry said. “As part of that platform Meehan made a pledge to not serve more than four terms, a central part of his campaign. This breaking of the pledge has been a controversial issue in the 5th Congressional District of Massachusetts.”

The new entry reads in part: “Meehan was elected to Congress in 1992 on a plan to eliminate the deficit. His fiscally responsible voting record since then has earned him praise from citizen watchdog groups. He was re-elected by a large margin in 2004.”

Vogel said, “It makes sense to me the biography we submit would be the biography we write.”

Luckily, though, someone was bright enough to edit this particular entry [Marty Meehan] to replace the facts that Meehan’s staff omitted.

A new reference to Meehan’s term-limit pledge was inserted in the Wikipedia entry in November by a person not using the House address.

And Wikipedia seems to be policing itself at various times.

In November and December, The Sun has learned, users of the House’s IP address were temporarily blocked from changing content because of violations described by the site as a “deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia.”

Funny how Whitehouse staffers are the most seriously involved in this “information” tampering.

a user wrote in a Wikipedia bio that Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor “smells of cow dung.” Another wrote that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is “ineffective.”

I personally don’t know if Eric Cantor smells of cow dung and do agree that Bill Frist is worthless, but I don’t think anyone from the Whitehouse should be messing with people’s information sources. It just gives me one more reason to be disgusted with all things D.C.

_{I would like to take this time to apologize for seeming incoherent. I’m on the verge of a fog and am dealing with Baby. It took me an hour just to write this much.}

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