Talk:U.S. Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia/Archive 1

A new scandal is developing: corporations have been caught editing wikipedia
Please see: Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard#Firestone

Bridgestone tire is editing the Firestone page (Bridgestone bought Firestone in 1988), Bridgestone employees have been deleting out all of the information which is critical of Bridgestone, we just caught them a couple of days ago.

I would like some help and advice on how to procede from those editors and administrators who have been involved with the WP:Congressional Staffer Edits, who broke the story?

How did this story procede?

Who were those who conducted "Further investigation by Wikipedia members"?

Travb (talk) 07:04, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Missing external link
In the Notes sections, the third note:  ''3. ^ "Gutknecht joins Wikipedia tweakers", Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, August 16, 2006, accessed August 17th, 2006'' that takes to the following article is missing. It should be deleted or found a new sources.--Francisco Valverde 20:26, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Objectivity?
I really like how it talks about all the bad things that Gutkechts' staffers did, and then sums it up with:

Gil Gutknecht lost the 2006 election.

Get that? Messing with Wikipedia = Death.

68.117.61.22 01:45, 23 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I particularly enjoy the fact that in the introduction, several high-profile cases are mentioned, but only Republicans get their own sections in the article. God forbid anyone should find out the details of a narcissistic Democrat. -69.47.186.70 (talk) 18:56, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Livejournal links
Livejournal fails both WP:RS and WP:EL, so I removed those links, and we also can't link to copyright violations, so I removed on those grounds too. - Denny  ( talk ) 16:19, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

U.S. Representative David Davis (R, Tennesseee-1)
The Knoxville News-Sentinel just this morning published an article about Davis press secretary Timothy Hill utilizing federal tax dollars and resources to vandalize David Davis (Tennessee politician).Bee Cliff River Slob 22:55, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2007/aug/11/entries-on-wikipedia-edited-bydavis-aide/#comments

State level editing
I just caught a CT state employee removing all references about prison overcrowding and psrole issues from the biography of State Rep. Michael Lawlor....which in the wake of the Cheshire home invasion massacre by two paroled convicts is a sticky wicket for him...I suspect digital airbrushing is being done by lots of political hacks on the state level —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Special:Contributions/ (talk)

Global perspective
Hi. This article should be clearer about which congress had staffers editing Wikipedia. This would be in keeping with Wikipedia's global perspective. I'll add "USA" to the title. (For people in the USA, this group might be "the" congress, but in my region, "the" congress is someone else - and they haven't been caught editing Wikipedia yet). --Gronky 11:46, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Internal account
It's been almost two years now; I don't think there is any need for the "internal account" to be linked here. I can understand the possible motivation at the time to have a hatnote for it. But it's a self reference and worse it can easily appear to be a POV fork of this article that happens to reside in Wikipedia space. We can do better than that - we can certainly present a fair and balanced article here, with NPOV, while still covering the important issues. I don't think that the internal account needs to be deleted; we can advertise it on the talk page. But I don't think it's particularly appropriate for the article. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 00:25, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Citing Wikipedia in Wikipedia
This citation (as of 01:37, 9 July 2008 (UTC)) is not okay. We cannot cite Wikipedia, as per WP:V: "Articles and posts on Wikipedia may not be used as sources." This is for the same reason Wikipedia should not be cited in an academic setting: it is not reliable or stable enough (to say nothing of potential conflict of interest from citing oneself). I will remove it within a day or two if there are no objections. -kotra (talk) 01:36, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Additionally: this and this (for the same reasons). -kotra (talk) 01:38, 9 July 2008 (UTC)


 * This is a little different. The quoted admonishment is against citing Wikipedia content, but the citations in question are actually referencing meta-content.  The edits did happen, and barring drastic administrative action, the cited logs of the edits taking place are permanent, and, I think they are authoritative.  That is, I don't think anyone questions whether the edit logs are accurate, since they form the foundation of the GFDL evidence WP depends on.--NapoliRoma (talk) 03:13, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Also, should probably use something other than the "cite_note-x" links to discuss the problematic citations; they'll point to the wrong citations if anyone removes one, or adds or removes a cite above them. At this point, it looks like the three citations you are concerned about are:


 * Wikipedia editors made a fairly extensive survey of edits from Congressional IP ranges:
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gil_Gutknecht&diff=65633218&oldid=65024590
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gil_Gutknecht&diff=69644632&oldid=69638576
 * Now that I look at it, I do think you're right about the first one, but I think the other two may be acceptable.--NapoliRoma (talk) 03:28, 9 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for transcluding the actual citations.
 * I think the spirit of "Articles and posts on Wikipedia may not be used as sources" is that in general, Wikipedia can't be used as a reliable source because of the temporary status of its articles, which shift and evolve constantly. In my mind, it doesn't matter if it's in the WP namespace or the Article namespace, in both places content changes, pages get moved, split, vandalized, etc. I agree, the last two sources are different, they're diffs, so they won't ever change. So they're probably ok as exceptions to this rule.
 * However, the text they are cited for is dubious, particularly for the last source. The text for it says "For the second set of edits on August 16, his [Gutknecht's] office used an anonymous Congressional IP address." but the citation doesn't prove that it was Gutknecht's office. Only by going to the IP's talk page can one find it's a Congressional IP address, but even there it doesn't actually mention any connection to Gutknecht. Sure, taken altogether there's a fair case to be made that the IP might be associated with Gutknecht's office, but I don't think it's strong enough basis to be admissible as a primary source. -kotra (talk) 05:58, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

WP:NOT
Come on, even the title sounds like a news headline. 98.166.139.216 (talk) 19:59, 8 November 2008 (UTC)


 * News headlines usually aren't simple noun phrases; t ypically there's a verb in there somewhere. Otherwise, please be specific: how is this article structured like a news story? If this article just covered one of the events, I could see that. But it spans several events over a year and a half. This isn't a news story, it's a description of a subject that happens to have gotten news coverage. -kotra (talk) 04:31, 11 November 2008 (UTC)