The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been seeing alterations in entries for members of Congress, including insults like “smells like cow dung” that seem to originate from within the halls of Congress itself.

That reference was made in the entry for Eric Cantor, a Republican representative from Virginia, according to CNET News.com. Another entry, about Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, said he “was voted the most annoying Senator by his peers in Congress. This was due to Senator Coburn being a huge douche-bag.”

Presidential spokesman Scott McClellan was listed under a similar term. Yet another entry, about Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, called him “ineffective.”

Wikipedia has traced much of this activity to IP addresses assigned to the Senate and the House of Representatives. The online encyclopedia, which permits anonymous users to post entries and edit others’ entries, has traced more than 1,000 instances of such alterations over the past six months to Congressional computers.

The problem got so bad that Wikipedia has repeatedly blocked and then unblocked one of the offending IP addresses from making further changes to its encyclopedia entries. The latest block occurred Wednesday.

Rewriting History

In some cases, though, the alterations were positive, if not always accurate. For example the Lowell Sun reported last week that entries for Democratic Representative Marty Meehan of Massachusetts were altered by members of his own staff to remove unflattering information.

Rep. Meehan’s chief of staff Matt Vogel admitted that he had authorized an intern last July to replace the congressman’s Wikipedia entry with one written by his own staff.

Among the deletions were a reference to Rep. Meehan’s broken campaign pledge not to serve more than eight years in his seat and to the size of his campaign account, which at $4.8 million dwarfed that of other House members.

The original entry said, “Meehan first ran for Congress in 1992 on a platform of reform. As part of that platform, Meehan made a pledge to not serve more than four terms, a central part of his campaign. … This breaking of the pledge has been a controversial issue in the 5th Congressional District of Massachusetts.”

The altered bio said, “Meehan was elected to Congress in 1992 on a plan to eliminate the deficit. His fiscally responsible voting record since then has earned him praise from citizen watchdog groups. He was re-elected by a large margin in 2004.”

However, some of the edits corrected errors, such as one saying that Representative Meehan planned to run for Senator Ted Kennedy’s seat.

Continuing Controversy

Wikipedia has been a subject of controversy in recent months after John Seigenthaler, a former editor at USA Today, discovered that his biography had been altered to implicate him in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.

Podcasting pioneer Adam Curry also admitted to altering an entry on the history of podcasting that edited out a mention of Kevin Marks, who has also claimed credit for the technology.

Last December, though, a team of reviewers found that the science entries on Wikipedia were as accurate as those in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (see Wikipedia Gets Things Right).

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has found himself and his mostly volunteer staff defending the site from online vandals on a regular basis.

“Of course we’re able to roll back the changes,” he said. “That’s fairly routine activity whenever we get somebody vandalizing the site.”

He said he had been able to trace much of the activity on the House side to one IP address that covers the entire House of Representatives, so it was difficult to isolate exactly where the vandalism originates in many cases.

Vandalism from Senate computers may be somewhat easier to locate, though.

“We can trace the Senate side to different IP numbers, but we can’t trace it back to particular offices,” said Mr. Wales. “It’s possible people will do further investigations to find out which offices make these changes.”

Bipartisan Vandalism

He said the offending activity has been occurring on a completely bipartisan basis, although one congressman put out a press release recently blaming the other side of the aisle for the activity, and Mr. Wales let him know that he was mistaken.

Mr. Wales insisted that so far all of the edits have been caught and the biographies reverted back to the original entries, except for the edits that were accurate.

“Not all of the edits were bad and those were kept,” said Mr. Wales. “We treat edits from Capitol Hill just like we treat edits from grammar school. If they don’t behave themselves, they get blocked.”