Congress shall make no Wikipedia edits until its members stop acting like children.
The online encyclopedia issued a 10-day block to a House of Representatives IP address that sabotaged several pages — including one edited to say former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is an “alien lizard who eats Mexican babies.”
The ban started on July 24 when Wikipedia editors decided the “disruptive editing” had gone far enough, said Katherine Maher, chief communications officer for the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Rumsfeld bio page was edited on July 15, with the originating IP address getting a one-day block as a warning. About a week later, a person from the same IP address edited the Wiki page of media blog Mediaite to say it was “sexist” and “transphobic” following a story it published about Twitter account @congressedits, which has been tweeting each time a page on the online repository is edited from a US Congress computer.
Other edits declared that the Cuban government faked the moon landing and claimed Lee Harvey Oswald was acting “on behalf of the Cuban government” when he assassinated JFK.
“The Wikipedia community works hard to ensure the neutrality and reliability of Wikipedia for the hundreds of millions of people who use it on a regular basis,” Maher said in a statement to The Post. “Vandalism to articles, whether political or otherwise, disrupts the process of making the world’s knowledge freely available to people around the world.”
A few weeks ago, someone inside the Russian government altered the online encyclopedia’s pages pertaining to Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, which was blown out of the sky July 17. The page was changed to say that Ukrainian soldiers had done the deed.