Wikipedia bans US Congress IP for troll-like edits

Wikipedia moderators have imposed a 10-day ban on an IP address originating from the U.S. House of Representatives after an anonymous(s) user vandalized several entries on politics, business, and history. The edits were first spotted by the anonymous twitter handle @congressedit, which posts all changes made from government-own IP. 

One of the first edits observed indicated that former U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld was actually a Mexican baby eating Alien Lizard. Another entry stated that Lee Harvey Oswald was “acting on behalf of the regime of Fidel Castro” when murdering former President John F. Kennedy. 

Here’s a fun bit: “On July 8th, 2014, President Barack Obama shook hands with a man wearing a horse head mask in Denver.”

Image courtesy of Gizmodo

However, many, many more edits aside, the one that finally brought the ban hammer down was an entry describing the media news site Mediaite as “sexist transphobic,” which “automatically assumes that someone is male without any evidence.” Ironically, Mediate had previously published a story on another series of rogue edits originating from congressional computer.

All in all, Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, is not amused of the publicity spotlighted on the situation, fearing the incident may inspire other pranksters. “There is a belief from some of the [Wikipedia] community that it only provoked someone – some prankster there in the office – to have an audience now for the pranks, and actually encouraged them rather than discouraged them.”

For those unfamiliar with how Wikipedia works: changes may be made to any page by any user; this can be done anonymously or from a registered account. These changes are then policed by volunteers known as Wikipedians, who have the authority to reverse incorrect edits and even ban repeat offenders (such as the US government troll.)

When reached out for statements by the BBC, House staffers responded with: “I think the probability is near zero that these disruptive edits are being done by a member of Congress.” And “Out of over 9,000 staffers in the House, should we really be banning this whole IP range based on the actions of two or three?”

Via BBC