UPDATED, 16:08, 4/26/06: Washington Governor Christine Gregoire's ex-campaign spokesperson last year reportedly altered online Wikipedia biographies of three candidates he worked against, including Washington Republican Dino Rossi, and has resigned today at the request of his current employer, a candidate for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Georgia.

Let's back up a second. You all recall Morton (Not So) Brilliant, the 2004 campaign spokesperson for Mrs. Gregoire of Washington State. Well, the life of some political hucksters can be quite.....itinerant. Most recently, he's been working for a candidate in the July 18 Democratic primary contest for Georgia Governor; she is current Secretary of State, Cathy Cox. Her opponent is Democratic Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor, whose son Fletcher was charged with driving under the influence in an August 2005 crash in Charleston, South Carolina, that killed a passenger. Brilliant has now resigned after pressure mounted today over apparently well-documented accusations he added that DUI information - not inaccurately, but in quite poor taste, the thinking goes - to the entry about Taylor in the well-known online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia. Courtesy of SP reader huckleberry in the comment string comes this link to a somewhat sanitized version of the altered page. This Macon.com (Macon Telegraph) article confirming Brilliant's resignation today also states:

The Taylor campaign had provided documents showing that the same online server that revised Taylor's profile tinkered in the same month with biographies on races in Washington state and South Carolina. Brilliant worked on both contests.

UPDATE II, 16:33, 4/26/06 - Taylor campaign spokesman Rick Dent explained to me seconds ago via phone from Georgia that after a March article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about partisan alterations to the Wikipedia biography of Democratic Georgia congressman Jim Marshall, the Taylor campaign figured out how to go back through the archived wiki edit logs to uncover the origin of the DUI language which Dent said first appeared on Taylor's Wikipedia bio last November. Dent told me they found that the IP address not only traced back to the Cox campaign, but that the very same IP address had been used in the same time frame to make changes to bios of gubernatorial candidates in Washington State (Dino Rossi) and South Carolina (current officeholder, Republican Mark Sanford), whose opponents Brilliant had worked for.

UPDATE III, 21:45, 4/26/06: Now, CNN reports the original language posted by Brilliant quite a bit more vituperative than that on the above-linked Taylor bio wiki page. To wit:

The original addition to Taylor's Wikipedia biography read: "Taylor's son Fletcher recently was involved in an alcohol-related car accident. The passenger in his car, whom Fletcher identified as his best friend, was killed. Currently, Fletcher is in an alcohol treatment facility awaiting trial."

Earlier today, according to AP:

Robert Brown, the Democratic leader of the state Senate, called on Cox to fire campaign manager Morton Brilliant. Brown said such activity "has no place in Georgia politics. Cathy Cox owes a public apology to the Taylor family," he said. "We are calling on Ms. Cox to fire her campaign manager, Morton Brilliant, who did this for Ms. Cox, and any others involved in this incident." The Cox camp said they were looking into the matter.

"We just heard about this and we are working with our information technology experts to address this," Cox spokesman Peter Jackson said....Revisions to the lieutenant governor's profile on Wikipedia, a popular online encyclopedia, can be traced to an Internet address registered to Brilliant, the Taylor camp said.

The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, confirmed late Tuesday that the edit to Taylor's biography traced back to the Cox campaign. But he said he had no way of knowing who made the change.

Brilliant's essential admission of guilt, via his resignation this afternoon, and his tinkering with the Rossi campaign bio, reflect quite poorly on the ethics of his current and past employers (including the Gregoire gubernatorial campaign) and the state and national Democratic party organizations, which pass around generic sleazeball consultants who will do anything they think will help their side win.

As to Wikipedia, two things.

First, altering candidate bios has, at present, a modest effect on election outcomes, if that much. But with the importance of online information in politics growing by leaps and bounds, such venues and associated partisan antics should be monitored as carefully as blogs. An "honest" direct mail hit piece from a campaign is one thing, from a 527 it's another, but still within existing rules, however flawed. On the other hand, altered candidate wiki bios are subject to no hard and fast regulation, just hoped-for corrections, hopefully made in the spirit of fair play. That's probably a necessary evil, as no sane person wants FEC or other government regulation of Internet political content. But anonymous partisan edits to opposing candidate wiki bios remain a real character indicator (and not in a good way).

Second, I think Wikipedia itself is by and large a valuable and informative tool, though not without problems. Partisan tampering on political entries and pitched wars on issue-related entries have occured previously. Still, don't condemn this evolving tool to the margins. Hyper-linked footnotes to outside sources, now in use at Wikipedia, are one useful balancing measure on issue-focused entries, but more authoritative methods of arbitration for this dogmatically open-source encyclopedia must come from the site's overseers. They must also enforce, rather than merely suggest, a rule that partisan operatives cannot post information on their political opponents' Wikipedia biographies.