Tom Emmer’s Wikipedia Page Wiped Clean

Here’s an example of Wikipedia at its worst and best.

First, someone using a Minnetonka based Comcast account (rather than a username or real name) decided to wipe out all of the content on Tom Emmer’s Wikipedia page:

Reason? “Campaign literature. Not factual.” While I agree that some of the content did read like campaign literature (in fact, a lot of it was was copy/pasted directly from Emmer’s campaign site and relies upon that site for citations), the content, for the most part, is factual.

That seems rather extreme. A better approach would be to deal with the items that are over the line. Clearly, most of the content was fine.

Now, the good news. The over the top edit was quickly reverted. How quickly? Check the time stamps on the images above and below. The page was back to its previous state within the same minute.

That’s one of the cool things about Wikipedia. It’s easier to fix vandalism than it is to create it, which is why pages tend to Roomba toward the truth.