Wikipedia Blocks U.S. House Computers Over ‘Disruptive Editing’

A participant of the three-day WikiCon 2013 looks at a wikipedia page on a computer in the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany, 24 November 2013. The largest conference of German-language Wikiped... A participant of the three-day WikiCon 2013 looks at a wikipedia page on a computer in the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany, 24 November 2013. The largest conference of German-language Wikipedia authors runs through 24 November 2013. Photo by: Uli Deck/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images MORE LESS
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Wikipedia administrators on Thursday temporarily blocked computers at the U.S. House of Representatives from making changes to pages because of “disruptive editing,” according to the Washington Post.

The 10-day block came after the Twitter feed @congressedits began automatically tweeting the edits to Wikipedia pages made from IP addresses in Congress, according to BBC News.

The edits included changes to pages about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and moon landing conspiracy theories. BBC News reported that the biography of former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was also revised to describe him as an “alien lizard who eats Mexican babies.”

However it was a change to the Wikipedia page for the media news site Mediaite that finally prompted the ban, according to BBC News. The page was reportedly edited to describe the site as a “sexist transphobic” publication “that automatically assumes that someone is male without evidence.”

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told BBC News that the editing did not surprise him, and that vandalism “always goes on and it always will.”

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