MANILA, Philippines – The Wikipedia page of Presidential Communications Assistant Secretary Mocha Uson has been locked down to prevent further revisions, following repeated attempts to amend or completely delete a subsection that recorded instances when Uson spread false news.

The hours-long editing war on Wednesday, April 11, saw concerted back-and-forth deletions, revisions, and rollbacks on Uson’s page.

The revision history of Uson’s Wikipedia page tells quite the story. It showed  that edits to the page on Wednesday were made by anonymous or relatively new Wikipedia editors. These edits were then adjusted or reverted by more veteran members of the Wikipedia community after vetting. The page was then locked down to avoid vandalism.

Wikipedia allows anyone to make edits to a given page, though these are subject to vetting by community editors and reverted if the edits are without merit. Anonymous users are tagged by their IP addresses.

In the case of Uson’s page, a number of attempts were made to edit or otherwise remove portions of the page between 1:34 pm and 8:46 pm on April 11. The actions were primarily focused on amendments to the subsection titled “Fake news and misleading information,” which recorded instances when Uson spread false or misleading information.

In one instance, a user named Jenpotz22 attempted to delete the entire Mocha Uson Wikipedia page. The justification, based on the history, read, “I need to Delete this wikipedia of somebody made this to hurt someone. This a (sic) article biased against MOCHA USON BLOG.” The page was rolled back soon after.

At 8:46 pm on April 11, user Oshwah locked down the page and placed it under protected status due to “persistent vandalism.” Protected pages can only be edited by either autoconfirmed users, extended confirmed users, template editors or administrators, depending on the level of protection enabled.

In a related edit following the lockdown on the page, user Object404 also removed information on Uson’s age and date of birth, due to a lack of sources for her birthdate.

Uson, a dancer and popular blogger who earned a government post for supporting Duterte’s presidential campaign, is reportedly among the senatorial candidates to be fielded by the ruling PDP-Laban in the 2019 elections. – Rappler.com