Gutknecht joins Wikipedia tweakers

Minnesota Star-Tribune ^ | August 16th, 2006 | Kevin Diaz

[RippyO]

Rep. Gil Gutknecht, R-Minn., is the latest politician to be found editing his Wikipedia entry, extending a year-long trend that has snagged the likes of Republican Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Democratic Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware.....

[linear]

Wow - I better go look to see what it says about me.

Or maybe I could just get on with my life.

[ansel12]

"Now Gutknecht, in effect, tried to expunge a reminder of a 12-year term-limit he imposed on himself in 1995.

Page histories available on Wikipedia show that Gutknecht's office tried twice -- July 24 and Aug. 14 -- to remove a 128-word entry on him and replace it with a more flattering 315-word entry taken from his official congressional biography.

In both cases, the original entry -- including his term-limit promise -- was restored within hours."


Pretty lame on his part.

[philsfan24]

i dont see the big deal in this. wikipedia is not reliable for anything and should not be seriously considered an encyclopedia. if a politician wants to change their profile, who cares. people post anything and everything up there. wikipedia is an entertainment site if anything.

[BelegStrongbow]

Clearly, the DBM has pretensions of elevating its status. I guess they figure it should be a reference tool, given it agrees with their points of view so often. That would certainly make it reliable so far as they see things, yes?

[burzum]

i dont see the big deal in this. wikipedia is not reliable for anything and should not be seriously considered an encyclopedia. if a politician wants to change their profile, who cares. people post anything and everything up there. wikipedia is an entertainment site if anything.

I disagree with you because of your assumption that other encyclopedia's are not biased. At least with wikipedia you can look up the page histories to see how an article has changed--just like in this case.

[Tamar1973]

Why can't wikipedia accept both versions of the biography? It would go against their liberal bias, I suppose.

[mnehring]

The entire point of Wikipedia is that ANYONE can edit it, there is nothing wrong with someone editing their own bio, if others don't like it, they can revert the changes.

The left gets all up in arms about when our side edits their bios, yet their little left wing neo-hippie hacks are all over Wikipedia editing their garbage into everything. Hell, just look at the revision history on President Bush's bio...

[Dumb_Ox]

Wikiality at Work

[highball]

I disagree with you because of your assumption that other encyclopedia's are not biased. At least with wikipedia you can look up the page histories to see how an article has changed--just like in this case.

And if you find biased information, then you can change it.

Nobody's contesting that his entry contains false information - it just seems to contain a little more true information than he'd like.

[RippyO]

Wikipedia is not an entity - it is an aggregation of the people who choose to edit their entries. You may say that more of these people are liberal than conservative, but it is not a closed room like the NY Times. Saying Wikipedia is biased is kind of like saying Internet users are biased.

Besides, both Dems and Pubs have changed their bios on Wikipedia. This incident is more like "Wow, that was lame of Gutknecht's office to do" rather than "Wow, all Republicans are liars."