The campaign of incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman isn’t blazing any trails when it comes to technology and new media, but he is holding his own. The standard YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and MySpace are all present and accounted for on Coleman’s campaign website. The campaign blog also features a link to a long-neglected account on the social messaging utility Utterz and a content sharing application called Sprout. But it wasn’t that long ago that Coleman was at the fore of using the Web to shape one’s political identity, and the subject of a fierce debate over ethics online. 


In early 2006, it was revealed that Coleman’s biography on Wikipedia was one of handful that had been edited by congressional staff in ways that were not deemed to be in good faith. The news was widely reported and sparked a fierce debate online and in the media.


In one instance, Coleman’s staff replaced the word "liberal," which was used to describe Coleman’s political stance in college, with "activist."


Staffers also removed a line stating that former White House advisor Karl Rove "reportedly convinced Coleman on behalf of the Bush Administration to seek a Senate seat in 2002 instead of running again for governor of Minnesota," and another which declared "in his first year in office he voted with President Bush’s position on bills 98 percent of the time."


Coleman’s then chief of staff, Erich Mische, conceded that the item regarding Coleman’s voting record should have remained but defended the staff’s actions.


"They’ve got an edit provision on there for the sake of editing when things are not accurate," Mische told The Associated Press. "I presume if they did not want people to edit, they wouldn’t allow you to edit."

When asked why Wikipedia mattered, Mische responded that "when you put ‘edia’ in there, it makes it sound as if this is a benign, objective piece of information."


Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales weighed in on the issue saying, "If they’re trying to edit in such a way to change the public record, that’s a problem."


Whether or not Coleman’s Wikipedia experience has impacted the campaign’s current online efforts, it is the type of controversy that Coleman and every other politician is hoping to avoid this election cycle and beyond.