Monday, January 30, 2006
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Edits by Massachusetts congressman Marty Meehan’s staff on his Wikipedia article spurred a Lowell Sun story and a subsequent Wikipedia investigation of all Internet addresses assigned to the Congress of the United States.
While edits from the Capitol are not generally news, the biographical article for Mr. Meehan was carefully edited, removing negative comments while expanding with content from the congressman’s political flyer. The IP address which made these edits has an extensive editing history on Wikipedia, and has been repeatedly blocked in past months for article vandalism and violation of Wikipedia policies (Wikipedia’s log of 143.231.249.141 being blocked from editing).
Wikipedia administrators, alerted to the Marty Meehan article edits, realized that many edits to politically-sensitive articles had been made from IP addresses assigned to the US Capitol building, and have begun an investigation into all edits from such addresses.