{"id":12711,"date":"2019-12-24T02:42:57","date_gmt":"2019-12-24T07:42:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/internsdc.com\/?p=12711"},"modified":"2019-12-24T02:42:57","modified_gmt":"2019-12-24T07:42:57","slug":"why-is-congress-editing-harry-potter-wikipedia-pages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atdevserver.com\/Internsdc\/why-is-congress-editing-harry-potter-wikipedia-pages\/","title":{"rendered":"Why is Congress Editing Harry Potter Wikipedia Pages?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By Ed Woodward \u00a0 \u00a0July 14, 2014<\/p>\n<p>WASHINGTON, DC &#8211; That&#8217;s what I want to know. And I&#8217;m going to get to the bottom of it. In what could be bigger than the IRS scandal or even Whitewatergate, Congress is editing Wikipedia pages!\u00a0<span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">(Editor&#8217;s note: \u00a0Watergate and Whitewater are two different scandals).\u00a0<\/span>This is pretty much Wikipediagate. But why are they doing it? That&#8217;s the 700 galleons question, isn&#8217;t it? It&#8217;s revisionist history happening right under our noses. Wikipedia represents everything George Washington fought a war of independence for. And now it&#8217;s being tampered with by mysterious people in the Senate and the House. (Probably congressional interns).<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Thank goodness for Congress-Edits for keeping them honest. The government watchdog group,\u00a0launched July 8, is a Twitter account that tweets whenever someone from an IP address associated with Congress makes anonymous edits on Wikipedia.\u00a0<a title=\"Congress-Edits on Twitter\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/congressedits\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Check it out on Twitter here<\/a><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-2336 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/internsdc.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/Congress-Edits-on-Twitter.jpg\" alt=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/congressedits\" width=\"500\" height=\"298\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Congress-Edit works like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Someone with a Congressional IP edits a Wikipedia page<\/li>\n<li>The site logs the user\u2019s IP address <strong>and<\/strong> information on the user\u2019s edits<\/li>\n<li>Congress-Edits gets\u00a0notified and tweets a link to the revision<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You might be asking how this is possible. Well, it&#8217;s because Congressional offices share IP addresses (which are public), so every time Wikipedia registers an anonymous edit from a Congressional IP address, Congress-Edits automatically updates.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>The Twitter account has only been around for a week but it has already registered a ton of edits. The most egregious changes so far have been the aforementioned editing of the Harry Potter pages. I don&#8217;t ever remember the Navy SEALs in Dumbledore&#8217;s Army. What the heck? It&#8217;s one thing to edit pages about people in Congress or the President or whatever, but it&#8217;s an entirely different thing to edit ANYTHING having to do with Potter. It&#8217;s obviously what brought me to this story.\u00a0<span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">(Editor&#8217;s note: we actually don&#8217;t want to know what brought you to the story Mr. Woodward. Please just report the facts. Thanks.)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>I immediately started investigating and tried to find out who was responsible for this. But I quickly discovered that tracing the changes back to a Congressional IP address in no way determines who actually made the edits. Total bummer, but the good news is, any time someone with a Congressional IP does make a change to Harry&#8217;s pages, @CongressEdits will keep me informed. Once I find out, you can then be sure <del>I&#8217;ll break the story on this infringement of our First Amendments rights as loudly and as clearly as I possibly can.<\/del>\u00a0<span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">that \u00a0The WISHington Post will be the first to report it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Like I said before, the staffers who are making all these changes are most likely interns, so with that in mind, I have a word to the wise for those of you who\u00a0are\u00a0Congressional interns: you can make your little edits to politicians and world leaders, <em><strong>but stay off of Harry Potter&#8217;s pages!<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0That&#8217;s just not cool. Congress-Edits is watching you.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll have more on this developing story as details become available. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Ed Woodward \u00a0 \u00a0July 14, 2014 WASHINGTON, DC &#8211; That&#8217;s what I want to know. And I&#8217;m going to get to the bottom of it. In what could be bigger than the IRS scandal or even Whitewatergate, Congress is editing Wikipedia pages!\u00a0(Editor&#8217;s note: \u00a0Watergate and Whitewater are two different scandals).\u00a0This is pretty much Wikipediagate. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12712,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[59],"class_list":["post-12711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internship-opportunities","tag-housing-in-dc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atdevserver.com\/Internsdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atdevserver.com\/Internsdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atdevserver.com\/Internsdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atdevserver.com\/Internsdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atdevserver.com\/Internsdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atdevserver.com\/Internsdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atdevserver.com\/Internsdc\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atdevserver.com\/Internsdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atdevserver.com\/Internsdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atdevserver.com\/Internsdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}