Most members and staffers of the US House of Representatives won't be able to edit pages on Wikipedia for more than a week. Administrators of the popular Web encyclopedia have imposed a 10-day ban on the IP address connected to Congress' lower house.
The ban comes after a series of wild "disruptive" edits that appeared following the creation of @congressedits, a bot that monitors anonymous edits from congressional IP addresses and announces them to the world via Twitter. The account was created just over two weeks ago and already has more than 23,000 followers.
Wikipedia editors explained their castigation for the IP address 143.231.249.138 on the user talk page. The 10-day edit ban follows a one-day ban imposed earlier this month, which apparently didn't do the trick.
Not long after the website Mediaite wrote a story about @congressedits, Mediaite's Wikipedia entry was changed by someone in the House, calling the site a "sexist transphobic news and opinion blog" that "automatically assumes that someone is male without any evidence." That change was cited by the Wikipedia admin who imposed the ban, reported earlier today by The Hill.
"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?" said one House user in response to the ban. "Some of us here are just making grammatical edits, adding information about birds in Omsk, or showing how one can patch KDE2 under FreeBSD."
Only anonymous edits from the House have been banned. House staffers could make a Wikipedia account, which would allow them to continue editing.
"I have [an account], but I don't sign into [it] with my password at work," responded a House user to that suggestion from Wikipedia. "Theoretically people could find out who I am, but good luck, I'm behind seven proxies. Haters gonna hate."
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