From the Star Tribune:
Gutknecht joins Wikipedia tweakers
He's the latest politician to try to edit his online biography, and he, too, was detected by a volunteer editor.WASHINGTON - Rep. Gil Gutknecht, R-Minn., is the latest politician to be found editing his Wikipedia entry, extending a year-long trend that has snagged the likes of Republican Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Democratic Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware.
Last January, Coleman sought to soften his political past from "liberal" to "activist" in the entry for him in the online encyclopedia. Biden tried to tone down references to a past accusation of plagiarism.
Now Gutknecht, in effect, tried to expunge a reminder of a 12-year term-limit he imposed on himself in 1995.
Page histories available on Wikipedia show that Gutknecht's office tried twice -- July 24 and Aug. 14 -- to remove a 128-word entry on him and replace it with a more flattering 315-word entry taken from his official congressional biography.
In both cases, the original entry -- including his term-limit promise -- was restored within hours.
The incident echoed a similar effort earlier this year by Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass., to remove a passage about a broken term-limit pledge. Others who tweaked information in their Wikipedia entries include Sens. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
Wikipedia, weary of frequent political transgressors, initially decreed a two-week block on the computer that serves the entire Congress, starting last Monday.
The block was lifted Wednesday, however, after Wikipedia administrators decided it was an "excessive block for an [Internet Protocol] shared by hundreds of people."
One of the sleuths in the Gutknecht incident is a 15-year-old Wikipedia "editor" from Nashville who says he acted out of no malice for Gutknecht, but rather to protect the integrity of the online encyclopedia, which invites the public to volunteer information for its entries.
"There's a policy against autobiographical edits," said the volunteer editor, Daniel Bush, who says he is home-schooled by his parents. "At Wikipedia, we call these 'edit wars.' "
A spokesman for Gutknecht did not dispute that his office tried to change his Wikipedia entry. But he called into question the reliability of the service, which was created in 2001 and claims to be the largest reference website on the Internet.
"We're concerned when anyone looks to Wikipedia for factual information," said Gutknecht spokesman Jon Yarian. "This is the same source that called former Assistant Attorney General John Seigenthaler a murderer in his official Wikipedia entry ... I would encourage people to find a more trustworthy place to do their research."
We love this remark from one of the editors:
Welcome to Wikipedia, Congressman. It has been brought to our attention that you, and or your staffers, have tried to ammend the article of yourself at Wikipedia. I would like to draw your attention to our policy on editing entries about yourself. Also, I would like you all to understand that we need to have a ballance view on our articles. While I am sure that you are a good Congressman, but the edits that you or your office has done has been considered self promotion and were removed by another one of our editors. If you have any more questioms, please, talk to me. Thank you. User:Zscout370 (Return Fire) 22:58, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
That note doesn't exactly give me great faith in the skills of Wikipedia's "editors," though.
Posted by: charlieq | August 17, 2006 at 09:47 AM