TheLen

Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 4, 2006; Page A01

This is what passes for an extreme makeover in Washington: A summer intern for seven-term Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.) altered the congressman’s profile on the Wikipedia Web site to remove an old promise that he would limit his service to four terms.Someone doctored Sen. Robert C. Byrd’s (D-W.Va.) profile on the site to list his age as 180. (He is 88.) An erroneous entry for Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) claimed that he “was voted the most annoying senator by his peers in Congress.”

Last week, Wikipedia temporarily blocked certain Capitol Hill Web addresses from altering any entries in the otherwise wide-open forum. Wikipedia is a vast, growing information database written and maintained solely by volunteers. In December, the database received 4.7 million edits from viewers, of which a relatively small number — “a couple of thousand,” according to founder Jimmy Wales — constituted vandalism.

As the site becomes one of the most heavily visited spots on the Internet, it’s testing the limits of collective smarts and integrity. But when it comes to Washington, where intrigue and passions run high, keeping such a public record is a particular challenge. Not only is there the obvious temptation to tinker with an opponent’s bio, there’s the whole subjective nature of political truth itself.

When the Wikipedia entry for Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) noted that he had criticized the president, for example, someone modified it to say that Reid had “rightfully” criticized the president. Someone also recast the state legislative record of Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.), changing a passage reading, “one of her final, failed bills would have made it much more difficult for same-sex parents to see their children in the hospital during an emergency” to the less inflammatory, “Musgrave spent much of her time on social issues, particularly authoring bills to protect children and the traditional definition of marriage, as well as gun owner’s rights.”

A popular change in recent weeks has been deleting mentions of former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) from politicians’ profiles. Politically motivated edits aren’t just coming from Capitol Hill; some comments are being traced back to other parts of political Washington, including the Justice Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Navy and Marines.

It seems like the kind of thing that must happen all the time on a site where absolutely anybody can weigh in on any topic. But such online behavior is actually the exception at Wikipedia, Wales said.

Wales started the project five years ago and, on the whole, said the experience has strengthened his faith in humanity. With some notable exceptions. “When somebody writes that Senator so-and-so is a [bad word], we figure that’s not a legitimate edit,” he said.

“The goal is to give people a free encyclopedia to every person in the world, in their own language,” Wales said. “Not just in a ‘free beer’ kind of way, but also in the free speech kind of way.”

Other open-source ventures on the Internet have proven productive; software developers have successfully designed and improved hundreds of online programs like Linux, which is made available for free to the public. Online marketplaces such as eBay Inc. rely on customer-satisfaction ratings to help buyers self-police their communities.

But, human nature being what it is, the experiment doesn’t always work. Both the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, for example, have aborted projects that invited open critiques of their editorial content after being deluged with crude comments.

Washington has posed a special problem for Wikipedia, which is monitored by 800 to 1,000 active editor-volunteers. In the recent flare-up, a community of Wikipedia editors read a story in the Lowell Sun newspaper in which staffers for Meehan acknowledged replacing an entry on him with more flattering verbiage. That prompted last week’s Capitol Hill Wikipedia blackout; all computers connected to servers at the House of Representatives, identified by a numerical Web address, were denied access.