House Republicans and Senate Democrats have something in common: They both love to edit their own Wikipedia pages.
Politicians and staff members from both sides of the aisle were found to be editing, adding, and removing large amounts of information from Wikipedia pages. Many of their edits eliminated or revised details on politician’s most embarrassing gaffes.
BuzzFeed reporter Andrew Kaczynski searched the House of Representative’s shared IP address on Wikipedia and found 33 embarrassing edits by House members and their staffs.
Remember when Rep. Gregg Harper, said that he hunts “liberal, tree-hugging Democrats, although it does seem like a waste of good ammunition?" According to his Wikipedia page, the incident never occurred.
“I know we’re all shocked—just shocked—that politicians are behaving this way,” joked Ron Reagan, MSBNC contributor and author of My Father at 100. He and Kaczynski appeared on Tuesday's Hardball to discuss the incident.
Though BuzzFeed’s report on the Senate edits hasn’t been released yet, Kaczynski noted that House Republicans and Democratic Senators were the most enthusiastic Wikipedia editors in Congress. He also said that Wikipedia is supposed to be non-partisan, adding, “You wouldn’t want something to have been written by the PR people.”
But Reagan thinks that a little creative revision is harmless compared to some of the other things these representatives do. “Messing around with your Wikipedia page is nothing when you’re comparing global warming to a massive global hoax," he said.
Harper co-sponsored a bill to exclude carbon dioxide from the definition of the term "air pollutant" in the Clean Air Act.