Administrators of the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia have banned computers with U.S. House Internet protocol (IP0 addresses from editing their pages. This imposed cutoff was made after "persistent disruptive editing" changes were made to politicians, businesses and historical event entries.

For 10 days, the block will limit all House of Representatives IP addresses from making any changes to Wikipedia's current text. A staffer said this shutoff is punishment for everyone due to "the actions of two or three."

Some of the edited entries include details about the Kennedy assassination that stated Lee Harvey Oswald was acting "on behalf of the regime of Fidal Castro." Another update on Donald Rumsfeld's page was edited to say that he was an "alien lizard." One of the more obscure edits updated the entry for Choco Taco to include that the ice cream dessert was available in some of the House vending machines.

Twitterbot account @congressedits, which posts tweets automatically each time a congressional computer is used to edit Wikipedia, shed light on the vandalism.

Founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, told BBC that this incident was not surprising to him since vandalism on the website has "always gone on and it always will." This is not the first time congressional IP addresses have been banned from Wikipedia for this type of misinformation.

However, Wales also said the automated @congressedits Twitter account may be more counter-productive than helpful for contributing to its government watchdog purpose.

"There is a belief from some of the [Wikipedia] community that [@congressedits] only provoked someone -- some prankster there in the office -- to have an audience now for the pranks, and actually encouraged them rather than discouraged them," he said.

"Maybe someone at the House of Representatives better think about their IT staff," Wales added. "They might be hunting them down this very moment."

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