U.s. Government Vandalizes Wikipedia 153.33.xxx.xxx gets permabanned

[beeseven 0]

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=536

U.S. Representative Marty Meehan (D, Massachusetts) has had his staff edit his Wikipedia page to eliminate negative information and strech truthful, positive things. Apparently the IP range 153.33.xxx.xxx has been blocked in the past for vandalism and violation of Wiki policies. This range is reserved for the U.S. House and Senate. Now it is getting permanently banned from editing articles as a result of continued violation.

[Iriacynthe 0]

It's really sad how some members of the government are still so arrogant that they believe they have the right to do things like this. What Wiki did, in my opinion, was far more effective than any other approach...and it's a bit amusing too.

[tdktank59 0]

YEs my life is nearing completion lol!!!the goverment has finally been pwnt lol!!! im happy now! the government needs to stfu and stop tryin to make the world better by hiding the truth from the damn people.. we also need to get rid of the sue happy people who will sue for the stupidist things... and also the damn copyrights on eveything that really cant be owned... such as GENES... in our own bodies wtf is up with this lol...some crazy amont of the human genes have copyrights on them so no one can even use them...so that means that when someone finds a cure for cancer by usign a gene thats copyrighted not by them... well guess what its going to go to court and the drug/alteration will never make it to the damn shelfs... itll be taken by the government and put into storage and never used... when we really do need to solve the problem...man i really hate this fing government...

[terminal2k 0]

ahahahahaha thats really funny, and definatly deserved by the US government. Some people think they can get away with anything because of who they are and what they do, nice to see the guys at wiki taking care of business

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

i think the editing tool is a good thing, but only if someone ads proper information to the page.i have done it once or twice during school projects..and i find it fun lmao...stupid congress trying to distupt the internet and the information, i wonder if they know allot of people use that for school projects.....and if they knew, it shows how much they care about our education, in which any other time they pretend to be sooo concerned about it.. i am supprised they didn't try and edit the information on weapons of mass destruction or osoma bin laden etc..lord knows they have screwed up enough but thats all im going to say!

Edited February 6, 2006 by Albus Dumbledore (see edit history)

[silentwind 0]

hahahaha, shaem on you US!!!

[kelvinismyname 0]

Why is it the Government always want to control things..! the information on the wikipedia is suppossed to be true and accurate, but as the case with all government ppl, they feel that the only way they can look good to the public is by protarying wrong and un-thruthfull so they wana take advantage of such a good internet resourceall they care about is there selves, and it seems they are willing to go to any level to send un-truthfull messages to the public . its good to see that they did not succeed this time,wikepedia is right to bann their Ip's

[stlgoalie 0]

welcome to the classic battle over who controls the information. The other part of this is the fact that for all the good stuff on the internet, there is so much crap. I remember in college when I first started using the intenet for research, most of the hits I'd get in Altavista or Google were from professor's websites at other colleges. Good quoteable content, but in my last two years and in to grad school I found myself returning to Lexis-Nexis and Ebscohost to access print articles online for research. Wikipedia is handy to look up general topics, but I'm not sure I'd rely on it as absolute truth. The problem when you open things up to anyone is that anyone can access it, the good along with the bad. Although I will say this, if the roles were reversed and the government banned the IP block range for Wikipedia's servers, everyone would be crying bloody foul...What if PETA or the ACLU edited their own page and got banned, I wonder if people would be outraged at Wikipedia...

Edited February 6, 2006 by stlgoalie (see edit history)

[wariorpk 0]

Everyone here is bashing the people from the United States government who edit their own pages. While I do not think this was the best thing to do I think that they had some justification. If someone were to create a web page saying the bad things you have done wouldn't you want the page changed? It is fully possible that this representative did not think the information was true and if he thought it was not he did what every person who knows something about a topic on Wikipedia would do and that is edit it.

[michaelper22 0]

Yeah, wait till the government sees this thread. Man, I only found one tiny little thing to change on WikiPedia, yet the gov. seems to want to edit (or even take down) the whole darn site! Way to go Wikipedia for banning the feds. Message to U.S. Representative Marty Meehan (D, Massachusetts) and his friends: Ever hear of freedom of the press? Well if you didn't, then it means that we can write preety much anything we want, WITHOUT your intervention!

[semeticsister 0]

That is totally absurd!!! What ever happened to checks and balances or freedom of speech? Damn...this is why I think the United States goverment can sometimes be just a bucket full of hypocritical turds. And anyway, Wikipedia is the best source for information online. For britannica or something else stupid like that you actually have to pay which is really retarded. WIKIPEDIA IS MY LOVE CHILD!!!

Edited February 14, 2006 by semeticsister (see edit history)

[stlgoalie 0]

That is totally absurd!!! What ever happened to checks and balances or freedom of speech? Damn...this is why I think the United States goverment can sometimes be just a bucket full of hypocritical turds. And anyway, Wikipedia is the best source for information online. For britannica or something else stupid like that you actually have to pay which is really retarded. WIKIPEDIA IS MY LOVE CHILD!!!

Wikipedia is useful for looking up general information and sometimes on off the wall information that you won't find other places. However, the fact that anyone can edit Wikipedia is a problem. There are people with way too much time on their hand that all they do is troll to see what miss information they can add and not have people notice, at least for a while. It's been said: the great thing about Wiki is anyone can edit. The bad thing about Wiki: anyone can edit. It is especially bad on certain topics that may have been written by someone with a PhD in the field, say econmics, and then someone else that might have had an econ course at a community college disagrees and writes something else. Or even if you have two respected people in a field that have different view points, especially with history, that this becomes a problem.

I can cite wiki articles in my papers, but they profs won't take them as seriously as say an article in the Harvard Law Journal or some such source I find through Lexis-Nexis. I don't pay for Lexis-Nexis, but I know the school's subscription is like $35,000 a year for the service. When I go out in practice, I might be paying some $2,500 a year for access to the service and money well paid for it too.

Information is only as good as the source you can cite and there are differences in terms of quality. Wiki is a good starting point, just not a good ending point.

[Florisjuh 0]

As a european I allways think bad of the us govrenement and happenings like this just validates those thoughts. Shame it needed to come as far as IP banning.

[Galahad 0]

I to am European, and don't look positively on US government, and their "we know what's best for the whole world" attitude. This only further proves the fact, that 90% of politicians are scum of the universe, and are in politics only for their own well being, no one elses. And I believe Europe should unite, and oppose US government, and their bullying of the entire world. I know the allmighty buck rules the world, but if we let politicians think for us, and let them serve us what they want, and not what we want... Well, let's just say it won't be nice...Anyways, thumbs up for Wikipedia staff for banning US government IP range, and I believe more admins should do something like this. They do not own us, and they are here for us, not the other way arround...If only we were in like 15th or 16th century... Mobs are great for solving cases like this one

[brainless 0]

yes, it is a bad thing if someone edits an article in the wikipedia in order to make him/herself or one's boss look better;no, the US government's not as bad as people in Europe say. I'm european myself and I'm far from liking the current US government but it's just as bad not to differentiate.This case has been reviewed by the wikipedia staff. yes, there have been some very bad edits, the average on the other hand doesn't look that bad:More than 1,000 (that's one thousand) edits were retraced to the House of Representative (or Congress? I'm not too familiar with the translations of US government bodies to german)'s proxy server.Of these 1,000-and-a-bit edits, only few were of a quality which could be called "bad faith", most anonymous changes could even be called constructive. When they checked the registered users which participated from the House of Representative's network, they found that all of those users participated in a constructive way and usually did not show too much of an interest in political articles.Users from the Senat's network however produced way more "bad faith"-edits but those were less manipulative than childish: One Senator was accused of smelling like horse sh*t, another one was said to be the largest know-it-all in Senat.well, the latter ones are somewhat easy to recognize as information which is not to be trusted.by the way, it's not only members of the US government which behave in such a bad way - during the last campaigns for the federal election in Germany, some politicians who were sure to get seats in parliament anyway tried to file law suits against wikipedia 'cause there was some information in there which they did not want to be available in public during election campaigns and some anonymous users changed the articles to more politician-friendly style.One politician even tried to convince the wikipedia community on the Discuss this article-pages to remove some information which he considered to be not true ... well, they're still in there and bundled with evidence even better than what has been there before he tried to change it...