Polls show that confidence in the integrity of politicians is at an all time low. Now politicians are editing entries on Wikipedia ! In an interesting article by Yuki Noguchi in today's Washington Post entitled " On Capital Hill playing WikiPolitics - Partisanship tests web site policies", he explains various examples of outrageous and fallacious editing. Wikipedia classifies such editing in 3 levels, from "whitewashing", which is fairly benign editing, to bad faith, and then vandalism. The politicians are not abiding by Wikipedia's policies, and are altering entries to suit their current position - so there are edits that go from altering electoral promises (say not to run more than x terms) to deleting mentions of Tom Delay in representatives' profiles. Wikipedia is monitoring 800-1000 of these editor/volunteers, and have denied access to computers connected to servers at the House of Representatives. Carrying over the sleazy spin practices of politics into the web's open forums should be resisted with vocal protestations, and even targeted hounding if this practice continues. Let's keep contributions to Wikipedia as clean and ethical as we can, and if self-regulation is not enough, let's make enough buzz to get the politician to clean up their act - at least on the open turf.
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