Some edits to the online encyclopediaWikipedia by staff of theUnited States Congress have created controversy, notably in early to mid-2006. Several such instances, such as those involvingMarty Meehan,Norm Coleman,Conrad Burns,[1] andJoe Biden, received significant media attention.[2] Others, such as those involvingGil Gutknecht, were reported but received less widespread coverage. Biographical information on various politicians was edited by their own staff to remove undesirable information (including pejorative statements quoted, or broken campaign promises), add favorable information or "glowing" tributes, add negative information to opponents' biographies, or replace the article in part or whole by staff-authored biographies.[2]
On January 27, 2006,The Sun ofLowell, Massachusetts, published an article entitled "Rewriting History Under the Dome", which revealed the editing by Congressional staff members of RepresentativeMarty Meehan's Wikipedia entry.[2][3] Meehan's chief of staff Matt Vogel stated that he had "authorized an intern in July to replace existing Wikipedia content with a staff-written biography of the lawmaker".[3] Further investigation byWikipedia editors discovered over a thousandedits by IP addresses allocated to either theUS House of Representatives or theUS Senate. Wikipedia editors found that most of the edits were considered to be ingood faith, but a minority of edits were considered improper. At least one of the addresses involved was prohibited from further editing.[4]
Yesterday's story, "Rewriting history under the dome," accurately reported that in July of 2005 an intern in my office responsible for updating my biography also updated my online Wikipedia entry. I did not know that this change was being made at the time and was only made aware of it yesterday when informed thatThe Sun had inquired about it. Though the actual time spent on this issue amounted to 11 minutes, according to server logs, I do not consider it time well spent or approve of it in any way. ... It was a waste of energy and an error in judgment on the part of my staff to have allowed any time to be spent on updating my Wikipedia entry. I thank The Sun for bringing it to my attention.[3]
— Congressman Marty Meehan,The Sun
Later in January 2006, SenatorNorm Coleman's chief of staff,Erich Mische, denied that Coleman's staffers had edited his page "to correct inaccuracies and delete information".[5] Mische stated: "What's to stop someone from writing in that Norm Coleman was 7 feet 10 inches, with green hair and one eye smack dab in the middle of his head? That's about as silly as this gets [...] When you put 'edia' in there, it makes it sound as if this is a benign, objective piece of information."[5] Wikipedia co-founderJimmy Wales said, "It appears to be a major rewrite of the article to make it more favorable."[5]
The Wikipedia investigation found that Biden staffers had removed and modified descriptions of incidents of alleged plagiarism and had recast discussion of a possibleBiden 2008 presidential candidacy in a more favorable light.[6][7] In February 2006,The Washington Post quoted Biden spokesperson Norm Kurz as saying that the changes that were "made to Biden's site by this office were designed to make it more fair and accurate."[7]
On August 16, 2006, the Minneapolis-St. PaulStar Tribune reported that the office of RepresentativeGil Gutknecht tried twice—on July 24 and August 14, 2006—to remove a 128-word section in the Wikipedia article on him, replacing it with a more flattering 315-word entry from his official congressional biography.[3][8] Gutknecht's office used the account "Gutknecht01" for the first edits on July 24,[9] which was then notified of Wikipedia policies against self-editing. For the second set of edits on August 16, his office used an anonymous CongressionalIP address.[10]
Most of the removed text was about a 12-year term limit Gutknecht imposed on himself in 1995. Gutknecht'sre-election bid in 2006 would have broken this promise if it had been successful. Gutknecht was ultimately defeated in the election, though not specifically as a result of this pledge. A spokesman for Gutknecht did not dispute that his office had tried to change his Wikipedia entry, but questioned the reliability of the encyclopedia.[3][8]
In August 2007, US RepresentativeDavid Davis's press secretary Timothy Hill at first denied—and later acknowledged, during a second press interview with theKnoxville News Sentinel—that he had used a congressional office computer and resources to edit Wikipedia in June 2007. His edits were to delete blocks of information about his employer and his brother Tennessee RepresentativeMatthew Hill from their respective Wikipedia biographies.[11] The information that was deleted "concerned political contributions to both his brother and Davis by formerKing Pharmaceuticals CEOJohn Gregory, as well as other ties to the Gregory family."[12]
In August 2011,The Huffington Post reported that an account claiming to be from the office of then-Indiana RepresentativeMike Pence edited Pence's Wikipedia page, noting that the account added past accomplishments and positive descriptions of thegubernatorial candidate as well as removing vandalism.[13]
On August 2, 2013, an editor using an IP address linked to the US Senate edited the Wikipedia page of whistleblowerEdward Snowden to change his description from "dissident" to "traitor".[14] On August 5, 2014, an editor using an IP address linked to the US House of Representatives edited the Wikipedia page of theUnited Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights,Navi Pillay, to describe Edward Snowden as an "American traitor".[15]
On August 21, 2014, an editor using an IP address linked to the US House of Representatives edited the page on the Netflix original seriesOrange Is the New Black to describe actressLaverne Cox as a "real man pretending to be a woman".[16]
On December 9 and 10, 2014, an anonymous user using an IP address registered to the US Senate (156.33.241.11) edited the article on theSenate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, removing a sentence characterizing the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" as "torture".[17]
In September 2018, an anonymous editor from Congressposted the personal information of several Republican senators in their articles,[18] leading toCongressEdits, a bot which posts edits to Wikipedia from IP addresses located in Congressional offices, beingbanned from Twitter. A former Democratic staffer named Jackson Cosko was arrested and eventually convicted for the doxxing; he had worked as a systems administrator for senatorMaggie Hassan (D-NH) and had been fired before the incident, used a colleague's key to sneak into the office, install keylogging software, and collect the personal information on senators.[19] He was arrested, charged with 7 crimes, and eventually convicted in the court caseUnited States of America v. Jackson A. Cosko.[20][21][19] Cosko was sentenced to four years in prison.[19] On September 27, thedisambiguation page for"Devil's Triangle" was edited from a House of Representatives IP address to describe it as adrinking game, matching thetestimony of Kavanaugh.[22][23]
The Wikimedia system has responded in at least three ways to questionable edits. The most obvious response is case-by-case, based on the "watch" button at the top of each article: A user who sets that switch can get emails when that article is changed. Another is an occasional (usually temporary) block. At least some of these are documented in Wikipedia. For edits from IP addresses associated with the US Congress, Ed Summers also created a Twitter feed to notify the world of any changes made from those addresses.@congressedits was an automated Twitter account from 2014 to 2018 that tweeted anonymous changes to Wikipedia articles that originated from IP addresses belonging to the United States Congress. Prior to the Twitter feed, the best information about what congressional staffers were editing was found in the present article on US Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia and in theWikipedia project page for congressional staffer edits, both of which are manually updated. The changes were presumed to have been made by the staffs of US elected representatives and senators.[24]
In August 2014, theCato Institute suggested that Congressional staffers should spend spare time editing Wikipedia. A panel hosted by the institute endorsed the idea so that congressional staffers could use their time to write neutral and informative articles about proposed legislation to better educate the public. Experts on the panel considered the two main obstacles to doing this as being skepticism towards Wikipedia and the history of biased editing from Congressional staffers. The Cato Institute suggested one way to overcome these issues would be for the staffers to create user accounts and user profile pages disclosing their connections with Congress.[25]
Perhaps sensing that it needed an online presence, someone on Capitol Hill, operating from a congressional IP address, decided to update Wikipedia to include an entry for "* "Devil's Triangle", a popular drinking game enjoyed by friends of Judge Brett Kavanaugh."
