[Lamplighter]

Christian Science Monitor
Peter Grier
August 8, 2012

Will Stephen Colbert mess up Mitt Romney's VP rollout?

Stephen Colbert, playing with the theory that Mitt Romney's team
will be polishing the Wikipedia entry of his VP choice,
urged viewers to recklessly edit entries of potential picks.
Wikipedia was not amused.
<snip>
On air, Colbert dragged out his laptop and (pretended) to mess up Mr. Pawlenty’s info,
as one can do with the crowd-sourced Wiki database.
He altered “born in St. Paul” to “St. Paul is where born Tim Pawlenty was," for example.
He changed the former Minnesota governor’s genealogy to reflect that
he was the child of Eugene Joseph Pawlenty and “Mrs. Butterworth."<snip>

Colbert’s own edits may have been pretend, but the Wikipedia hierarchy took his threat seriously.
As the Wikipedia talk page on the Pawlenty entry makes clear, administrators
have locked the Pawlenty page to prevent any more Santa’s workshop-level changes.

They’ve locked and armored the pages of Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio,
Marco Rubio, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, and
Central Intelligence Agency Director David Petraeus as well.

And that could end up frustrating the detail-oriented communications folks in Romney’s HQ.