Misplaced Pages

Some edits to the online encyclopedia Misplaced Pages by staff of the United States Congress have created controversy, notably in early to mid-2006. Several such instances, such as those involving Marty Meehan, Norm Coleman, Conrad Burns, and Joe Biden, received significant media attention. Others, such as those involving Gil 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.

Background

On January 27, 2006, The Sun of Lowell, Massachusetts, published an article entitled "Rewriting History Under the Dome", which revealed the editing by Congressional staff members of Representative Marty Meehan's Misplaced Pages entry.

Matt Vogel, Meehan's chief of staff, said that he had authorized an intern in July to replace existing Misplaced Pages content with a staff-written biography of the lawmaker.

Further investigation by Misplaced Pages editors discovered over a thousand edits by IP addresses allocated to either the House of Representatives or the Senate. Misplaced Pages editors found that most of the edits were considered to be in good faith, but a minority of edits were considered improper. At least one of the addresses involved was prohibited from further editing.

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 Misplaced Pages entry. I did not know that this change was being made at the time and was only made aware of it yesterday when informed that The 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 Misplaced Pages entry. I thank The Sun for bringing it to my attention.

— Congressman Marty Meehan, Lowell Sun

Incidents

Norm Coleman

Later in January 2006, Senator Norm Coleman's chief of staff, Erich Mische, denied that Coleman's staffers had edited his page "to correct inaccuracies and delete information". 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."

Misplaced Pages co-founder Jimmy Wales said, "It appears to be a major rewrite of the article to make it more favorable."

Joe Biden

The Misplaced Pages investigation found that Biden staffers had removed and modified descriptions of incidents of alleged plagiarism and had recast discussion of a possible Biden 2008 presidential candidacy in a more favorable light. 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."

Gil Gutknecht

On August 16, 2006, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune reported that the office of Representative Gil Gutknecht tried twice—on July 24 and August 14, 2006—to remove a 128-word section in the Misplaced Pages article on him, replacing it with a more flattering 315-word entry from his official congressional biography. Gutknecht's office used the account "Gutknecht01" for the first edits on July 24, which was then notified of Misplaced Pages policies against self-editing. For the second set of edits on August 16, his office used an anonymous Congressional IP address.

Most of the removed text was about a 12-year term limit Gutknecht imposed on himself in 1995. Gutknecht's re-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 Misplaced Pages entry, but questioned the reliability of the encyclopedia.

US Rep. David Davis and Tennessee Rep. Matthew Hill

In August 2007, US Rep. David Davis's press secretary Timothy Hill at first denied—and later acknowledged, during a second press interview with the Knoxville News Sentinel—that he had used a congressional office computer and resources to edit Misplaced Pages in June 2007. His edits were to delete blocks of information about his employer and his brother Tennessee Representative Matthew Hill from their respective Misplaced Pages biographies. The information that was deleted "concerned political contributions to both his brother and Davis by former King Pharmaceuticals CEO John Gregory, as well as other ties to the Gregory family."

US Rep. Mike Pence

In August 2011, The Huffington Post reported that an account claiming to be from the office of then-Indiana representative Mike Pence edited Pence's Misplaced Pages page, noting that the account added past accomplishments and positive descriptions of the gubernatorial candidate as well as removing vandalism.

Edward Snowden

On August 2, 2013, an editor using an IP address linked to the US Senate edited the Misplaced Pages page of whistleblower Edward Snowden to change his description from "dissident" to "traitor".

On August 5, 2014, an editor using an IP address linked to the US House of Representatives edited the Misplaced Pages page of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, to describe Edward Snowden as an "American traitor".

Laverne Cox

On August 21, 2014, an editor using an IP address linked to the US House of Representatives edited the page on the Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black to describe actress Laverne Cox as a "real man pretending to be a woman".

Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture

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 the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, removing a sentence characterizing the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" as "torture".

Kavanaugh hearings

In September 2018, an anonymous editor from Congress posted the personal information of several Republican senators in their articles, leading to CongressEdits, a bot which posts edits to Misplaced Pages from IP addresses located in Congressional offices, being banned 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 senator Maggie 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. He was arrested, charged with 7 crimes, and eventually convicted in the court case United States of America v. Jackson A. Cosko. Cosko was sentenced to four years in prison.

On September 27, the disambiguation page for "Devil's Triangle" was edited from a House of Representatives IP address to describe it as a drinking game, matching the testimony of Kavanaugh.

Congressional edits

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 Misplaced Pages:Congressional staffer edits.

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 Misplaced Pages articles that originated from IP addresses belonging to the United States Congress. The changes were presumed to have been made by the staffs of US elected representatives and senators.

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 Misplaced Pages and in the Misplaced Pages project page for congressional staffer edits, both of which are manually updated.

Proponents

In August 2014, the Cato Institute suggested that Congressional staffers should spend spare time editing Misplaced Pages. 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 Misplaced Pages 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.

See also

• List of political editing incidents on Misplaced Pages
• Misplaced Pages coverage of American politics
• Misplaced Pages:Congressional staffer edits

References

1. Williams, Walt (January 1, 2007). "Burns' office may have tampered with Misplaced Pages entry". Bozeman Daily Chronicle. Retrieved February 13, 2007.
2. ^ Anderson, Nate (January 30, 2006). "Congressional staffers edit boss's bio on Misplaced Pages". Ars Technica. Retrieved April 28, 2008. The activities documented included:
   • rewriting Norm Coleman's article to be more favorable, said to be "correcting errors";
   • removing from Conrad Burns' article quoted pejorative statements he had made, and replacing them with "glowing tributes" such as "the voice of the farmer"; and
   • removal of unfavorable information from Joe Biden's article.
3. ^ Evan Lehmann (January 27, 2006). "Rewriting History Under the Dome". The Lowell Sun. MediaNews Group.
4. Misplaced Pages editors made a fairly extensive survey of edits from Congressional IP ranges: "Misplaced Pages:Congressional Staffer Edits". Misplaced Pages. Retrieved June 22, 2006.
5. ^ "Web site's entry on Coleman revised Aide confirms his staff edited biography, questions Misplaced Pages's accuracy". St. Paul Pioneer Press. Associated Press. Archived from the original on September 29, 2007. Retrieved June 22, 2006.
6. Blakely, Rhys (February 9, 2006). "Washington's politicians edit Misplaced Pages". The Times. London. Archived from the original on July 9, 2008.
7. ^ Noguchi, Yuki (February 9, 2006). "Misplaced Pages's Help From the Hill". The Washington Post.
8. ^ Diaz, Kevin (August 16, 2006). "Gutknecht joins Misplaced Pages tweakers". Star Tribune. Archived from the original on August 21, 2006.
9. "Gil Gutknecht". Misplaced Pages, the 💕.
10. Gutknecht01
11. Knoxnews article Entries on Misplaced Pages edited by Davis aide published August 11, 2007.
12. knoxnews article Lawmaker's office awaits panel's verdict on aide's act published August 15, 2007.
13. Carter, Zach (August 18, 2011). "Did Mike Pence's Office Edit His Misplaced Pages Page To Make It More Flattering?". Huffington Post.
14. Kloc, Joe (August 3, 2013). "Is a U.S. senator trolling Snowden's Misplaced Pages page?". The Daily Dot. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
15. Julian Hattem (August 5, 2014). "House staffer edited Misplaced Pages page to label Snowden a 'traitor'". The Hill. Retrieved August 6, 2014.
16. Meija, Paula (August 23, 2014). "Anonymous House of Representatives User Banned for Transphobic Misplaced Pages Edits". Newsweek. Retrieved August 31, 2014.
17. Bobic, Igor (December 12, 2014). "Senate Staffer Tried To Scrub 'Torture' From Torture Report's Misplaced Pages Entry". The Huffington Post. Retrieved December 14, 2014.
18. Papenfuss, Mary (September 28, 2018). "Judiciary Committee Members Doxxed During Kavanaugh Testimony". The Huffington Post. Oath. Retrieved October 2, 2018.
19. ^ Gerstein, Josh (June 19, 2019). "Ex-Hassan aide sentenced to 4 years for doxing senators". POLITICO. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
20. Mordock, Jeff (April 5, 2019). "Former Democratic staffer pleads guilty to 'doxing' Republican senators". The Washington Times. Retrieved August 5, 2019.
21. McBride, Jessica (June 20, 2019). "Jackson Cosko: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know". Heavy.com. Retrieved August 5, 2019.
22. Wolf, Zach Byron (September 27, 2018). "Misplaced Pages entry for 'Devil's Triangle' changed to match Kavanaugh's answer". CNN. Perhaps sensing that it needed an online presence, someone on Capitol Hill, operating from a congressional IP address, decided to update Misplaced Pages to include an entry for "* "Devil's Triangle", a popular drinking game enjoyed by friends of Judge Brett Kavanaugh."
23. @congressedits (September 27, 2018). "Devil's Triangle (disambiguation) Misplaced Pages article edited anonymously from US House of Representatives" (Tweet). Archived from the original on September 27, 2018 – via Twitter.
24. Murphy, David (July 12, 2014). "New @congressedits Twitter Account Tracks Anonymous Misplaced Pages Updates". pcmag.com. Retrieved June 21, 2024.
25. Schwab, Nikki (August 18, 2014). "Cato Institute Experts Call on Staffers to Edit Misplaced Pages". U.S. News & World Report. Retrieved August 18, 2014.

External links

• David Mehegan Bias, sabotage haunt Misplaced Pages's free world The Boston Globe, February 12, 2006

• United States
• Politics
• Misplaced Pages

• 2000s controversies in the United States
• 2010s controversies in the United States
• 2000s in American politics
• 2010s in American politics
• Conflict-of-interest editing on Misplaced Pages
• Congressional controversies in the United States
• Employees of the United States Congress
• History of Misplaced Pages
• Misplaced Pages controversies