As the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported late last night, Rep. Gil Gutknecht (R) is the latest member of Congress to be caught red-handed trying to rewrite his own Wikipedia entry. Like the others who edited before him — and got busted before him — Gutknecht wanted to eliminate a reference to a broken campaign promise, and so, brilliantly, replaced the section with a few hundred words from Gutknecht’s official bio, thereby also making Wikipedia unwitting plagiarists. What it ended up getting him was a whole new subhead about the incident — not to mention the unflattering Strib coverage.
But that isn’t all his office tried to change. Most preposterously, they thought they could re-edit the very first paragraph into a colorful lead-in sounding nothing like any other congressional bio on the site, and somehow nobody would notice. Take a look at this screen shot from his entry’s History page, highlighting the differences between Gutknecht’s version (on the left) and the revert to what it looked like before (on the right). It’s a thumbnail, so you’ll have to open the full-size version in another tab:
Did the Gutknecht people really think Wikipedians would prefer to hear about his family history and church attendance instead of, you know, the details of his government service, which is what qualifies him to be listed in Wikipedia in the first place? Many people who are what Wikipedia would term “non-notable” try to write pages about themselves; these are deleted as “vanity” pages. I’m going to guess it’s less common that “notable” figures seek to turn their own entries into vanity pages.
Gutknecht deserves all the bad press he gets for this, even more than the geniuses who came before him. Well, maybe a bit less than Wikipedia’s own founder, Jimmy Wales.
Of course it was unethical to do and idiotic to imagine they wouldn’t be caught. But it was also their very disregard for Wikipedia’s customs that all but guaranteed they would be called out, and quickly. If they’d had the sense to edit from an off-site computer, or bothered to create a User ID, or to make subtler changes, it’s very possible they’d have gotten away with it, at least for awhile, and likely would have escaped public attention entirely.
I’m all for wider web literacy, but to a certain extent, widespread ignorance has the unintended consequence of keeping people honest.
P.S. For local reaction from left-leaning bloggers, see MN Publius, Vox Verax and A Bluestem Prairie.
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