Wikipedia has put up a wiki entry describing how unknown people using U.S. House and Senate computers have been sanitizing or defacing politician’s Wikipedia entries:

The following is a partial list of U.S. Senator biographies on the english-language Wikipedia edited by Senate employees.

• Senator Conrad Burns’ page was edited to remove negative comments as positive comments were added.

• Senator Norm Coleman’s page was also edited to remove negative comments while positive comments were added.

• Senator Robert Byrd’s page was vandalized

• Senator Tom Harkin’s criticism section was deleted, a major section on Israel & military removed and later vandalized by a different IP

• Senator Joe Biden’s page had a major edit removing significant criticism

• Sen Tom Coburn’s page was vandalized more than once

Similar activity took place on the House side, leading Wikipedia to block edits from the House’s IP addresses for a week while they figure out what to do.

We looked at the edits to Senator Barbara Boxer’s entry, but found only evidence of deluded fans, not staff-created PR.

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H/t: Good Morning Silicon Valley, which referenced Evan Lehmann’s initial story here.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 30th, 2006 at 1:45 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.