Wikipedia Bans one shared IP address in US Congress bldg from Editing

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unokitty

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reptilians.png

... one edit changed the Wikipedia page for Reptilians, the lizard people who are the subject of numerous conspiracy theories which say that they control everything from the British monarchy to the American government...

Other edits accused the Cuban government of faking the moon landings, and named the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as an alien wizard.
Pando Daily reported that @Congressedits revealed a "Moon landing conspiracy theories" edit coming from a Congressional IP address; the congressional staffer editor blamed the Cuban government for spreading Apollo 11 conspiracy theories.

Making matters worse, when the change was covered by Mediaite, someone from a Congressional IP address promptly changed Mediaite's Wikipedia page to add that the site was a "sexist transphobic" publication that "that automatically assumes that someone is male without any evidence."
"The idea of reptilians on Earth was popularized by David Icke, a conspiracy theorist who says shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies. Icke has claimed on multiple occasions that many of the world leaders are, or are possessed by, reptilians ruling the world.

From Ars Technica:
Most members and staffers of the US House of Representatives won't be able to edit pages on Wikipedia for more than a week. Administrators of the popular Web encyclopedia have imposed a 10-day ban on the shared IP address connected to Congress' lower house.

Whoa!

Uno
 
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IronWing

No Lifer
Jul 20, 2001
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I imagine if Congress were to edit the wiki entry for "granola" the result would be 650,000 words to simply define the term.
 

networkman

Lifer
Apr 23, 2000
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The idea that someone would actually trust the content of Wikipedia as being completely true and genuine is ludicrous! :p
 

networkman

Lifer
Apr 23, 2000
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Wikipedia is as accurate as anything written by humans.

I would disagree with that statement by virtue of the fact that Wikipedia can be so readily edited to contain false information as well as true, making it in effect less authoritative than a book that is published such as a dictionary or encyclopedia.

And on a side note, I think the the Reptilian People in the OPs post are cute. :)
 

alzan

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May 21, 2003
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Wiki pages are editable; AFAIK the linked sources, if any, are not.

A person can quite easily test the veracity by comparing the written entry to it's source(s).
 

mmntech

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Sep 20, 2007
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It's quite entertaining how US propaganda has sunk to the level of school yard name calling.

The same folks have Twitter accounts for other governments as well. I follow the one for the Parliament of Canada. Here's a recent gem from someone working at Statistics Canada on the article on the Atlanta Falcons.
The '''Atlanta Falcons''' are a professional [[American football]] team based in [[Atlanta]], [[Georgia (U.S. state)|Georgia]]. They are a member of the [[NFC South|South Division]] of the [[National Football Conference]] (NFC) in the [[National Football League]] (NFL) and their biggest fan is David Ayele.
 

unokitty

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User talk:143.231.249.138

Your host, b249-138.house.gov (143.231.249.138 ), is registered to Information Systems, U.S. House of Representatives and may be shared by multiple users of a government agency or facility, so you might receive messages on this page that were not intended for you.

In response to vandalism from this IP address, anonymous editing may be disabled. If you are an unregistered user operating from this address, note that it may be possible for your agency or facility's administration to determine who was making contributions from this address at any given time and abuse reports may be sent to its network administrator for further investigation.[/QUOTE}

To read the rest of the ban, click on the link at the top.

To visit the bot that tweets anonymous Wikipedia edits from Congress click @congressedits.



Uno
 
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DrPizza

Administrator Elite Member Goat Whisperer
Mar 5, 2001
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I would disagree with that statement by virtue of the fact that Wikipedia can be so readily edited to contain false information as well as true, making it in effect less authoritative than a book that is published such as a dictionary or encyclopedia.

And on a side note, I think the the Reptilian People in the OPs post are cute. :)
You sound like a high school English teacher. It's been quite a few years since Nature (a peer reviewed journal) did a study of wikipedia vs. Brittanica. Both had approximately the same number of errors per article. Wikipedia articles are often longer though. And, Wikipedia has taken many steps to make their pages even more truthful. E.g., this thread - deface an article and get blocked from editing.

Don't believe me, go for it - conduct an experiment. Alter a page to something false and see how long it takes until it's corrected (and that you cannot edit another page).
 
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