Wikipedia brings down the ban-hammer on US Congress

by
in internet on (#3RR)
Someone over at the US House of Representatives - or maybe a group of someones - has made such a nuisance editing Wikipedia that Wikipedia's administration has applied a ten day ban on all anonymous edits at the site.
What precipitated the ban was not edits to articles about jam bands and their fans' favorite foods, but rather a series of more creative edits that suggested that, among other things, Cuban spies orchestrated the assassination of JFK and a race of hyper-intelligent extra-terrestrial lizardmen has infiltrated the U.S. government, Mediaite said. ... ome staffers are upset about the ban and took to Wikipedia to complain. "Out of over 9000 staffers in the House, should we really be banning this whole IP range based on the actions of two or three? Some of use here are just making grammatical edits, adding information about birds in Omsk, or showing how one can patch KDE2 under FreeBSD," said one staffer from the House's IP address.
Important take-away conclusions from this article:
1. House Representatives or their staffers are spending way too much time on Wikipedia.
2. The Twitterbot and Wikipedia oversight have been useful and shed light on what's going on.

But most importantly:

3. Holy crap: the House of Reps is running KDE2 on FreeBSD!

Re: Really? (Score: 4, Interesting)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-07-26 00:53 (#2NC)

Don't forget your average staffer in the House is a recently-graduated person with a masters, and they're paid close to nothing. A lot do it for the experience, or for the cachi© of having worked in Congress. But the pay isn't great, and I'm told a huge number of House Reps are humongous assholes of the most arrogant sort. They are probably finding refuge in Wikipedia.
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