Wikipedia has imposed a ten-day ban on page edits from computers registered at the US House of Representatives, following “persistent disruptive editing”.
Someonenrevised the biography of former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, describing him as an “alien lizard who eats Mexican babies”.
A page relating to the assassination of John F Kennedy was changed to say that Lee Harvey Oswald was acting “on behalf of the regime of Fidel Castro”.
It is not only in the US that mischief occurs. Earlier this year, the phrase “all Muslims are terrorists” was added to a page about veils by users of UK government computers.
Wikipedia allows anyone to edit pages, even anonymously, but all edits are policed by volunteers, known as Wikipedians, who can reverse false edits, and even impose bans on users who continually flout the site’s editing rules.