Tuesday, August 26, 2014

I’m A Little Leery…

About the news of the House of Representative being banned from Wikipedia, in case you haven’t seen it in the news this week,
Anonymous House of Representatives User Banned for Transphobic Wikipedia Edits
By Paula Mejia
Newsweek
Filed: 8/23/14

Twitter account congress-edits reported on Thursday that an anonymous Wikipedia user—writing from an IP address linked to the U.S. House of Representatives—is editing articles on the online database to reflect transphobic opinions. Pages about actress Laverne Cox, one of the stars of Netflix’s popular series Orange is the New Black, were edited, as well as pages about Camp Trans and transphobia, among others.

The articles were all edited under the IP address 143.231.249.138, which has since been been [sic] blocked for the third time in the past few months due to a string of controversial Wikipedia edits users have made from it. Users operating from that IP address are banned from editing for the next month. Fran Rogers, administrator at Wikipedia, blocked the address for “disruptive editing.”
The reason why I am leery about reporting this is that IP address can be spoofed, for what I understand it is rather easy to fake the address. I would not put it past a hacker to fake something like this but it could also be true.

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