Several such instances, such as those involving Marty Meehan, Norm Coleman, Conrad Burns,[1] and Joe Biden, received significant media attention.
[2] On January 27, 2006, The Sun of Lowell, Massachusetts, published an article entitled "Rewriting History Under the Dome", which revealed the editing by Congressional staff members of Representative Marty Meehan's Wikipedia entry.
[2][3] Matt Vogel, Meehan's chief of staff, said that he had authorized an intern in July to replace existing Wikipedia content with a staff-written biography of the lawmaker.
[5] Mische stated: "What's to stop someone from writing in that Norm Coleman was 7 feet 10 inches, with green hair and one eye smack dab in the middle of his head?
His edits were to delete blocks of information about his employer and his brother Tennessee Representative Matthew Hill from their respective Wikipedia biographies.
[13] On August 2, 2013, an editor using an IP address linked to the US Senate edited the Wikipedia page of whistleblower Edward Snowden to change his description from "dissident" to "traitor".
[14] On August 5, 2014, an editor using an IP address linked to the US House of Representatives edited the Wikipedia page of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, to describe Edward Snowden as an "American traitor".
[15] On August 21, 2014, an editor using an IP address linked to the US House of Representatives edited the page on the Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black to describe actress Laverne Cox as a "real man pretending to be a woman".
[19] On September 27, the disambiguation page for "Devil's Triangle" was edited from a House of Representatives IP address to describe it as a drinking game, matching the testimony of Kavanaugh.
A panel hosted by the institute endorsed the idea so that congressional staffers could use their time to write neutral and informative articles about proposed legislation to better educate the public.
Experts on the panel considered the two main obstacles to doing this as being skepticism towards Wikipedia and the history of biased editing from Congressional staffers.