The free encyclopedia has been forced to ban users from the US Congress building from editing the articles, after at least one member of staff began trolling the website. A few edits, apparently made as a joke, have been picked up by the automatic Twitter bot Congress Edits – this bot monitors Wikipedia for changes to the website made by accounts with IP addresses coming from inside the legislature of the United States.

For example, one of the edits in question changed the Wikipedia page for Reptilians, the lizard people who are the subject of numerous conspiracy theories, because the say that they control everything, starting from the UK monarchy and up to the US government.

The troll added the phrase: “these allegations are completely unsubstantiated and have no basis in reality”, and this line was duly tweeted out by the account. In the meantime, other edits that were made accused the Cuban government of faking the moon landings or called the former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld “an alien wizard”. Apparently, these jokes were the final straw for Wikipedia’s operators, who had to take a decision to implement a 10-day ban on any changes coming from the US Congress, providing the following explanation: “disruptive editing originating from that IP-address”.

Apparently, the admins banned just one IP-address, as the other members of Congress can continue to edit the website if they sign up for the account of Congress Edits. The latter is indirectly the brainchild of journalist and coder Tom Scott. A few days ago, he created Parliament Edits – a Twitter account tracking everyone making edits to Wikipedia from a parliamentary network. His creation followed in the footsteps of numerous news stories of embarrassing edits to the free encyclopedia originating from within the House of Commons. Tom Scott went even further and released the code to the bot, which allowed to set up similar accounts for legislatures in other countries.

It turned out that there have been almost 6,000 edits from parliamentary IPs in the past decade, including adding information about MP Mark Pritchard’s divorce; deleting a “controversy” section from Andy Burnham’s page entirely; and clearing references to Lord Razzil’s shareholdings in an African mining company.