Screenshot via NBC4

While no one would ever accuse you of doing this, dear reader, it appears that Capitol Hill staffers — and perhaps their elected bosses! — are editing Wikipedia pages that don’t seem to fall under their job description.

The edits are made by people with an IP address connected to Congress. This includes adding Bon Jovi and Ludwig van Beethoven to the It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia page …

… changing “however” to “then” on the Step Up 3D page …

… and adding President Obama’s encounter with a person wearing a horse head mask to the horse head mask page.

But the feed also can serve a serious function as a watchdog. So far, the edits have been fairly innocuous (adding Rep. Blake Farenthold to Corpus Christi’s page) and a little silly (we now know the Heritage Foundation’s Brian Darling “was involved in breeding rare long haired cats” during his youth), history has shown that’s not always the case.

The Twitter feed was created by software developer Ed Summers, who explained his decision to do so in a blog post.

Watching the followers rise, and the flood of tweets from them brought home something that I believed intellectually, but hadn’t felt quite so viscerally before. There is an incredible yearning in this country and around the world for using technology to provide more transparency about our democracies.

Sure, there were tweets and media stories that belittled the few edits that have been found so far. But by and large people on Twitter have been encouraging, supportive and above all interested in what their elected representatives are doing. Despite historically low approval ratings for Congress, people still care deeply about our democracies, our principles and dreams of a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

@CongressEdits and its inspiration @ParliamentEdits have already inspired other accounts including @CongresoEdita, @phrmaedits and @AussieParlEdits.

Filed Under: congress, twitter, wikipedia,