Wikipedia Imposes 10-day ban on Page Edits from US Congress

Administrators of Wikipedia - the collaborative encyclopedia - have imposed a 10-day ban on page edits by anonymous person/persons using a US House of Representatives IP address due to "persistent disruptive editing".

"You have been blocked from editing for a period of 10 days for persistent disruptive editing, as you did at Mediaite. Once the block has expired, you are welcome to make useful contributions," a Wikipedia message said.

Administrator Tom Morris told Congress on Thursday: "If you think there are good reasons why you should be unblocked, you may appeal this block."

The administrators, however, informed the legislative body that it can once again make "useful contributions" post the expiration of the ban, Russia Today reports. This is not the first time that edits from computers using the IP address of the House of Representatives have been banned. Earlier, bans were imposed following similar acts of vandalism.

One staffer expressed his displeasure on the Wikipedia page for the blocked IP address saying that they are being banned for the "actions of two or three".

"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 us here are just making grammatical edits, adding information about birds in Omsk, or showing how one can patch KDE2 under FreeBSD."

However, the 10-day ban only applies to a single IP address that had been making several "disruptive edits" which could affect a number of users as multiple congressional officers often use one IP address. 

Apart from events like the Kennedy assassination, changes were also made to entries on politicians and businesses, BBC reports.

In the biography of former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, an anonymous editor added that he was an "alien lizard".

According to Aljazeera, the edits were first discovered by @congressedits - an automated Twitter account that linked to all changes made to Wikipedia articles originating from the congressional IP addresses.