Amorrow on December 11, 2007 contacted Senator Joe Lieberman:
http://lieberman.senate.gov/contact/
I found it curious Sen. Leiberman on Tuesday (10:00 AM
Place: Dirksen Senate Office Building, Rm. 342) at the E-Government 2.0 subcommittee mentions http://thomas.loc.gov/ as an important web site that should be easier for the public to browse for specific content. He mentions this specifically about a five minutes into his opening comments. His words were that Thomas "are intentionally presented in a format that limits the public's ability to examine Senator's records."
The web page is here. See the 7:00 mark in this video See also here for a blog entry of that quote.
Sadly, a set of Wikipedia pages that carefully indexed the fragmentary information on a specific issue in the Thomas web site were stripped of all such links to the Thomas web site. Rather than point to the Wikipedia web site directly, I will provide links to archive.org which openly displays the old content but, unfortunately, formats it poorly. For instance, in September 2006, these version were available:
http://web.archive.org/web/20051215000000/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Morgan
http://web.archive.org/web/20051215000000/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Morgan_Act
It is easy with archive.rog to show that the information was there starting in late 2005 and remained for all of 2006.
You should note that the current information on Wikipedia is merely:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Morgan_Act
and on February 2, 2007, Mr. Wales personally chose to reduce the biographical page down to a single sentence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elizabeth_Morgan&oldid=105200370
which triggered other administrators to, within days, delete the articles on the two acts of Congress. The old "deleted" versions are no longer visible to the public on the Wikipedia web site, forcing one to use archive.org to see what the old content was.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=&user=&page=Elizabeth+Morgan+Act
The justifications were not based on the content of the articles: they were based strictly who Mr. Wales, et. al. felt about one of the authors of that content.
While espoused by some totalitarian societies, I think that Sen. Lieberman would agree that destroying intellectual works based solely on the notion of who the author is, is clearly an un-American aspect of Wikipedia and the persona of Mr. Wales himself and far too many of the Wikipedia administrators that are his personal friends.
This is especially tragic because the Elizabeth Morgan Act was clearly a mistake by Congress as it was overturned in 2003 as unconstitutional. If its overturning had not been so obscure, perhaps Congress would have not embarrassed itself yet again in front of the World via its passing of the "Palm Sunday Compromise" in the case of Terri Schiavo in 2005, which was also clearly a
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder
or more specifically an affront to the notion of the Rule of Law and the Separation of Powers with politicians attempting to decide the outcome of an individual ongoing court case via legislative intervention.
But the Senator does have to listen to me: one of the world experts on this matter is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Turley
No intelligent person would argue that Wikipedia is not useful, but one should temper their enthusiasm for it with the un-American aspects of how Mr. Wales choses to operate that web site.