Unraveling the trail of senatorial edits

Wow, how to make a sensible headline for this one.  I’ve not posted about this story before, but enough other sites have that I think most regular web surfers now know at least a little about this story.  Recently, there have been a number of edits to Wikipedia pages regarding a number of Senators.  Most of the edits have been made to remove facts about the Senators that could be viewed negatively.  The part that made the story big is that these edits have been coming from an IP address assigned to the Senate.  Now, Wikinews has taken the time to backtrack a lot of what’s gone on and determine who made what edits in many cases.  The write up of how they tracked this back, and what changes were made is quite interesting, in my eyes.  Of course, since Wikinews is also a wiki, I wonder how many edits to this story we’ll see?

Staff members of the offices of United States Senators, using Senate-linked IP addresses, have been editing Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia that allows any of its users to edit its content. In some cases, they have removed negative facts about Senators from the articles.

Using the public history of edits on Wikipedia, Wikinews reporters collected every Senate IP which had ever edited on Wikipedia as of February 3 and examined where the IPs came from, what they edited, and of what those edits consisted. IP, or Internet Protocol, addresses are unique numbers electronic devices use to communicate with each other on an individual basis.

[tags]Wikipedia, Wikinews, Senate[/tags]