yes, it is a bad thing if someone edits an article in the wikipedia in order to make him/herself or one's boss look better;

no, the US government's not as bad as people in Europe say. I'm european myself and I'm far from liking the current US government but it's just as bad not to differentiate.

This case has been reviewed by the wikipedia staff. yes, there have been some very bad edits, the average on the other hand doesn't look that bad:
More than 1,000 (that's one thousand) edits were retraced to the House of Representative (or Congress? I'm not too familiar with the translations of US government bodies to german)'s proxy server.
Of these 1,000-and-a-bit edits, only few were of a quality which could be called "bad faith", most anonymous changes could even be called constructive. When they checked the registered users which participated from the House of Representative's network, they found that all of those users participated in a constructive way and usually did not show too much of an interest in political articles.

Users from the Senat's network however produced way more "bad faith"-edits but those were less manipulative than childish: One Senator was accused of smelling like horse sh*t, another one was said to be the largest know-it-all in Senat.

well, the latter ones are somewhat easy to recognize as information which is not to be trusted.

by the way, it's not only members of the US government which behave in such a bad way - during the last campaigns for the federal election in Germany, some politicians who were sure to get seats in parliament anyway tried to file law suits against wikipedia 'cause there was some information in there which they did not want to be available in public during election campaigns and some anonymous users changed the articles to more politician-friendly style.
One politician even tried to convince the wikipedia community on the Discuss this article-pages to remove some information which he considered to be not true ... well, they're still in there and bundled with evidence even better than what has been there before he tried to change it...

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I to am European, and don't look positively on US government, and their "we know what's best for the whole world" attitude. This only further proves the fact, that 90% of politicians are scum of the universe, and are in politics only for their own well being, no one elses. And I believe Europe should unite, and oppose US government, and their bullying of the entire world. I know the allmighty buck rules the world, but if we let politicians think for us, and let them serve us what they want, and not what we want... Well, let's just say it won't be nice...

Anyways, thumbs up for Wikipedia staff for banning US government IP range, and I believe more admins should do something like this. They do not own us, and they are here for us, not the other way arround...

If only we were in like 15th or 16th century... Mobs are great for solving cases like this one

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As a european I allways think bad of the us govrenement and happenings like this just validates those thoughts. Shame it needed to come as far as IP banning.

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Wikipedia is useful for looking up general information and sometimes on off the wall information that you won't find other places. However, the fact that anyone can edit Wikipedia is a problem. There are people with way too much time on their hand that all they do is troll to see what miss information they can add and not have people notice, at least for a while. It's been said: the great thing about Wiki is anyone can edit. The bad thing about Wiki: anyone can edit. It is especially bad on certain topics that may have been written by someone with a PhD in the field, say econmics, and then someone else that might have had an econ course at a community college disagrees and writes something else. Or even if you have two respected people in a field that have different view points, especially with history, that this becomes a problem.

I can cite wiki articles in my papers, but they profs won't take them as seriously as say an article in the Harvard Law Journal or some such source I find through Lexis-Nexis. I don't pay for Lexis-Nexis, but I know the school's subscription is like $35,000 a year for the service. When I go out in practice, I might be paying some $2,500 a year for access to the service and money well paid for it too.

Information is only as good as the source you can cite and there are differences in terms of quality. Wiki is a good starting point, just not a good ending point.

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