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Marty Meehan - Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia
Censoring information online has been a touchy subject and now the US government is banned from Wikipedia for altering facts

Recently, the Wikipedia community has been shaken up. Because of its nature, anyone can contribute to its content or edit existing material. The Goal of Wikipedia has been to provide free flowing information on just about everything in the world. In fact, one can look up information ranging from different US Presidents down to individual Congressmen that have run in and are running still, in office.

Over the past several weeks however, Wikipedia administrators began noticing changes been made on one Congressman's biography page in similar fashion to suspicious activities on other Wikipedia pages. Congressman Marty Meehan, currently running in the US government as a Democratic member since the early 90's has had his staff alter certain text to boost his support and public image. Certain factual truths about Mr. Meehan and his party members that were deemed "negative" and told "too much", were thoroughly edited to remove certain parts of history, events, and things said.

The biographical article for Mr. Meehan was carefully edited, removing negative comments while expanding with content from the congressman's political flyer. The IP address which made these edits has an extensive editing history on Wikipedia, and has been repeatedly blocked in past months for article vandalism and violation of Wikipedia policies.

Wikipedia administrators have now said that they will permanently block IP addresses that are associated with the US House and US Senate. Both of these entities actually have entire IP blocks reserved for them. The 156.33.xxx.xxx range belongs solely to the US government and is no stranger to Wikipedia.

With Wikipedia's self audit, the US government has now been called out on something which many feel is just as bad. Censoring information has been a hot topic recently, and many have voiced that information must remain freely available. However, what Marty Meehan and company have been doing recently directly affects the web community's efforts into creating a source of reliable and abundant information for the masses.




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