Erich Mische

USA Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia

Some Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia (that is, changes to Wikipedia by staff of the United States Congress that directly involved their employees or their opponents) have created controversy, notably in the early to mid-2006 timeframe. Several such instances, such as those involving Marty Meehan, Norm Coleman, Conrad Burns, Susan Collins, 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 Congressman Marty Meehan's Wikipedia entry.

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

Further investigation by Wikipedia members discovered well over a thousand edits by IP addresses allocated to the US House of Representatives and Senate. Most of the edits were considered to show good faith by Wikipedia editors. A minority of edits were considered improper. At least one of the addresses involved was blocked from further editing.

Norm Coleman

Later in January 2006, Senator Norm Coleman's chief of staff, Erich Mische, "confirmed that the senator's staff had done so...the editing was done to correct inaccuracies and delete information". Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said "It appears to be a major rewrite of the article to make it more favorable."

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."

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 Wikipedia article on him, replacing it with a more flattering 315-word entry taken from his official congressional biography. Most of the removed text was about the 12-year term-limit Gutknecht imposed on himself in 1995 (Gutknecht ran for re-election in 2006, breaking his promise). A spokesman for Gutknecht did not dispute that his office tried to change his Wikipedia entry, but questioned the reliability of the encyclopedia.

Gutknecht's office used the account "Gutknecht01" for the first edits on July 24; that account was then notified (via its talk page) of Wikipedia policies against self-editing. For the second set of edits on August 16, his office used an anonymous Congressional IP address.

David Davis and Matthew Hill

In August 2007, U.S. Rep. David Davis’ press secretary Timothy Hill acknowledged that in June 2007 he had used a congressional office computer to delete unflattering information about his boss and his brother Matthew Hill from biographies on Wikipedia. "Part of the information he tried to remove 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.