The Wikipedia Hustings

The battle for the next general election is already being fought – on Wikipedia:

Dawn Butler (Lab – Brent South) and Sarah Teather (LD – Brent East) will be fighting it out for the re-drawn seat of Brent Central at the next election, but online the battle has already started. The conflict is taking place on their Wikipedia entries (Butler, Teather), and researchers and party supporters almost definitely involved.

If you look at the history pages for both entries, and you’ll see a user called Brent Central has been duelling with an anonymous user working in the House of Commons (the most common Parliamentary IP address is 194.60.38.10). The fight has been going since mid-June and involved more than 60 edits in under a month.

A nice piece of reporting from Recess Monkey, there. And it’s very interesting that both sides seem to consider Wikipedia an important enough site that their representation there matters.