U.S. Congress Banned from Editing Wikipedia After Staff Caught Trolling
July 28th, 2014If I had a Humor category…
Via: Guardian:
Wikipedia has been forced to ban users inside the US Congress building from making edits to the collaborative encyclopaedia, after at least one member of staff began trolling the site.
A number of edits, apparently made in jest, have been picked up by the automatic twitter bot Congress Edits, which monitors Wikipedia for changes to the site made by accounts with IP addresses coming from inside the US legislature.
For instance, one such 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.
The wag added the line “these allegations are completely unsubstantiated and have no basis in reality,” which was duly tweeted out by the account.
Other edits accused the Cuban government of faking the moon landings, and named the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as an alien wizard.
It seems that those edits were the final straw for Wikipedia’s administrators, who implemented a 10-day ban on any changes coming from one particular IP address within the US Congress, “due to disruptive editing originating from that address”.
