Hill staffers spin Web encyclopedia

ATLANTA — Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that can be altered by anyone with a computer, has proved remarkably useful for pulling political dirty tricks.

Political operatives are covertly rewriting — or defacing — candidates’ biographical entries to make the boss look good or the opponent look ridiculous.

As a result, political campaigns are monitoring the Web site more closely than ever this election year.

Revisions made by Capitol Hill staffers became so frequent and disruptive earlier this year that Wikipedia temporarily blocked access to the site from some congressional Internet addresses. The pranks included bumping up the age of the Senate’s oldest member, West Virginia’s Robert C. Byrd, from 88 to 180, and giving crude names to other lawmakers.

The entry for Democratic Rep. Jim Marshall of Georgia labeled him “too liberal” for his state, in part because of a contribution he received from a political action committee run by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat. The man who doctored Mr. Marshall’s biography now works for his Republican challenger.

In Georgia this week, the campaign manager for a candidate for governor resigned amid allegations he doctored the Wikipedia biography of an opponent in the Democratic primary.

Morton Brilliant was accused of revising the entry for Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor to add his son’s arrest last August in a drunken-driving accident that left his best friend dead.

The information was accurate and had been in the news, but Mr. Brilliant’s boss, Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox, declared the son’s legal troubles out of bounds.

The link to Mr. Brilliant was discovered by Mr. Taylor’s campaign, which immediately accused the Cox camp of engaging in “gutter politics” and demanded Mr. Brilliant’s resignation.

Some 1,000 volunteer monitors scan changes to Wikipedia’s entries to keep them free of obvious partisan editing, factual errors and profanity, said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

“The beauty of a forum like this is free speech,” Mr. Wales said.

Mr. Wales said entries have to meet a standard of newsworthiness and, as a general rule, should not be written by an interested party — either a supporter or an opponent.

But finding out who is writing what on the site is not always easy. Internet addresses can be traced to a computer, but not necessarily to the person at the keyboard. And experts say someone with computer savvy could easily cover his or her tracks.

With more and more Americans getting news and information from the Internet, the stakes are high. Wikipedia had 25.6 million unique visitors in March, making it the 18th-most popular site on the Internet.

Wikipedia leapt into the news last year after the journalist and former Kennedy administration aide John Seigenthaler Sr. complained that someone had edited his Wikipedia entry to say that he had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. The man who posted the false information said it had been a joke.

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