LOWELL -- Members of US Representative Martin Meehan's staff have acknowledged that they deleted unflattering information about a broken campaign promise from an online encyclopedia, according to a published report.
Content on Wikipedia, an encyclopedia that relies on volunteers to post information, was replaced to remove references to Meehan's broken term limit pledge, the Sun of Lowell reported.
Meehan's chief of staff Matt Vogel told the newspaper that he oversaw the removal last July of information, which was replaced with a staff-written biography.
Meehan, a Lowell Democrat, pledged to serve just four terms -- eight years -- but he later broke that campaign promise. He's currently serving his seventh term.
''Meehan first ran for Congress in 1992 on a platform of reform," the pre-edited entry said, according to the Sun. ''As part of that platform Meehan made a pledge to not serve more than four terms, a central part of his campaign. This breaking of the pledge has been a controversial issue in the 5th Congressional District of Massachusetts."
The new entry read in part: ''Meehan was elected to Congress in 1992 on a plan to eliminate the deficit. His fiscally responsible voting record since then has earned him praise from citizen watchdog groups."
Vogel said some errors and ''sloppy" writing were replaced. One error included a reference to Meehan attending Harvard.
''Let the outside world edit it," Vogel said. ''It seemed right to start with greater depth than a paragraph with incorrect data from the '80s."
Yesterday, a note was displayed on Meehan's page that said ''as a result of recent vandalism, editing of this page by new or anonymous users is temporarily disabled." It also noted on the page that there's ''admitted Wikipedia vandalism by Meehan's staff."
Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, said removal of facts is wrong.
''You don't delete it," Wales said. ''If they wanted to put in their side of things, that would seem ethically relevant, rather than just omitting it."
A new reference to Meehan's term limit pledge was reinserted in the Wikipedia entry in November, the Sun reported.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
Edits by Massachusetts congressman Marty Meehan's staff on his Wikipedia article spurred a Lowell Sun story and a subsequent Wikipedia investigation of all Internet addresses assigned to the Congress of the United States.

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While edits from the Capitol are not generally news, the biographical article for Mr. Meehan was carefully edited, removing negative comments while expanding with content from the congressman's political flyer. The IP address which made these edits has an extensive editing history on Wikipedia, and has been repeatedly blocked in past months for article vandalism and violation of Wikipedia policies ( Wikipedia's log of 143.231.249.141 being blocked from editing).

Wikipedia administrators, alerted to the Marty Meehan article edits, realized that many edits to politically-sensitive articles had been made from IP addresses assigned to the US Capitol building, and have begun an investigation into all edits from such addresses.