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Congressional Staffers hacking Wikipedia

By Kevin Morrissey

January 30th, 2006

Apparently, a few Congressional staffers are rewriting or deleting portions of the Wikipedia entries of their bosses (via Slashdot). The adminstrators at Wikipedia have temporarily resorted to banning them: “the IP ranges of US Congress have been currently blocked, but only for a week until the issue can be addressed more directly.” The (Mass.) Lowell Sun reports that:

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. . . . 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 months.

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