In the same week that we learned that the Bandanna club website had a link in Wikipedia, I also read an interesting BBC Article about how US Congress staff have been making “Partisan” changes to political biographies.

Using the edit history on Wikipedia, researchers collected the IP numbers of computers linked to the US Senate and tracked the changes made to online pages.

Changes appear to have included:-

• The application of a healthy dose of “spin” to polish up the bio’s of selected congressmen
• The removal of key “facts”, including voting history and purported military service information.

Bemusing as this is, it is more interesting to note that the entry for Dubya has been changed so often that Wikipedias monitors have had to block subsequent editing (I suppose there is only so many times the designated monitors can amend the Bush entry to remove entries containing words such as: “stupid”, “lying”, “impeach”, “corrupt”, “coup”, “warmonger” and “asshole” before it becomes boring!)

Perhaps Wikipedia ought to introduce an amendment to the existing “compare to previous version(s)” facility which displays a prominently displayed red link for entries which:-

• Have been modified within the last 7 days
• Have been modified by a source which the monitor reasonably believes to have a vested interest (based on the changes made)

…maybe then congress staff might actually concentrate on doing their JOBS – serving the public – instead of polishing the biographies of their bosses…

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