Written By Reprise Media | January 31, 2006 | Share This |

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Last month’s Wikipedia accuracy controversy (we touched on it here) returns this month, now wearing the austere face of the US Congress.

The Lowell Sun first broke a story last Friday revealing that Matt Vogel, Rep. Marty Meehan’s Chief of Staff, instructed an intern to replace his boss’ existing Wikipedia bio with one that corrected some factual errors, and also by the way eliminated references to his broken campaign pledge not to serve more than four terms. It also deleted a blurb about his $4.8 million war chest, the largest in the house according to the FEC.

Responding to criticism that his staff should not have deleted facts while improving Meehan’s entry, Vogel said, “It makes sense to me the biography we submit would be the biography we write.” This made less sense to Wikipedia, which discovered that the Meehan whitewashing represented only two of about 1,000 such ‘corrections’ emanating from the House’s IP address over the last six months. This prompted the online encyclopedia to open a Request For Comment page, their standard method for mediating disputes.

While many of the edits weren’t of a suspicious nature, quite a number amounted to little more than middle school name-calling. Congresspersons were termed “ineffective,” or smelling of “cow dung,” and in two instances (according to cnet’s politics blog) were compared unfavorably with a certain feminine hygiene product.

While Wikipedia certainly frowns on being used by our leaders to call each other “doo-doo head,” their response, in grand political tradition, has been a bit flip-floppy. They blocked the House of Representative’s IP address for a week yesterday, then unblocked it today. Hopefully our good Wikipedians will rise to fill the void; when last checked, Rep. Meehan’s entry contained an entire paragraph about both his term-limits pledge controversy and the Wikipedia dust-up itself.

Topics: International |