Seems some of our public servants spend their time sanitising their political masters’ Wikipedia entries. The website, Wikiscanner, detects the IP address of computers making Wikipedia entries, and traced a number of edits to the Departments of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and Defence. Some 126 edits on subjects ranging from the children overboard affair to the Treasurer, Peter Costello, were traced to PM&C IP addresses. Defence computers were found to have made more than 5000 edits to Wikipedia entries, including to articles on the “9/11 Truth Movement”, the Australian Defence Force Academy and even the Vietnam War-era Pentagon Papers.

Funny edits reported included:

On June 28 an employee of PM&C modified Mr Costello’s entry to remove a reference to the nickname “Captain Smirk”.
another employee last year modified an entry on a style of martial arts to add the sentence “Poo bum dicky wee wee”.

And not only are the federal public service at it, the NSW Premiers Department has staff sitting around editing the wiki entries about their leaders, defending Premier Morris Iemma, and former Premier Bob Carr. And not only the government - Kevin Rudd admits his political staff do edit entries for factual corrections. Rudd draws the distinction that political staffers is one thing, public servants another:

“My own personal staff, I’m sure, look through Wikipedia to make factual changes, no excuses about that, but using public service departments to make sure the truth is delivered according to Howard?”

“It is entirely legitimate for your personal political staff to make changes of a factual nature, but to engage public servants to go out there and re-edit history, it strikes me as odd to say the least,” Mr Rudd said.

I actually suspect this is not so much a case of a politically driven Ministry of Truth scenario with governments out to doctor the facts to suit their own world view, but more likely is a case of idle public servants with nothing better to do. The Department of Defence’s actions in blocking employees’ access to Wikipedia suggests this … while the stated reason is that:

“It was found that [Wikipedia use] was exceeding our guidelines, particularly those that prevent personal comment from being confused as Defence comment,” a spokesperson said. “Consequently, Defence has blocked the general ability to edit Wikipedia from within its systems. This action is expected to be completed shortly.”

it sounds like there’s a bit of too many staff = not enough productive work to go around = bored public servants = entertaining themselves by playing on the internet (ie BAU for Defence).

However its not only Australian public servants and/or political staffers doing it. Others detected by Wikiscanner including the CIA, the Vatican, the Republican Party, the UN, the US Senate and the US Democratic Party’s Congressional Campaign Committee have all been sprung making self-serving wiki contributions.

Late news: Head of PM&C, Dr Peter Shergold, denies staff in his department are editing wiki entries. He says investigations have revealed that the IP addresses traced back to the department were in fact not those of the department any more (since 2004) and were used by other customers of the departments internet service provider.