I spotted this today - "Somewhat less excitingly: Stephen O'Brien, an MP with far too much time on his hands, had been asking Parliamentary Questions about whether government department staff have edited Wikipedia ..."
http://news.ansible.co.uk/a261.html Huh, I thought. Interesting. It turns out the question was asked a little over a year ago, but you might like to see the responses - * The Ministry of Defence (who have blocked write access since November 2007), and the Department for Transport both name names. [1] * Health give us a little graph of their activity, month-by-month (using our data - 1500 edits or so), but don't name articles. [2] * Children, Schools and Families admit that "a Minister" has edited one article, and Culture, Media & Sport have edited 103 articles, but neither will say what they were. * Wales & the FCO are definite they haven't done any, but most other departments just gave the traditional ritual incantation of "this information is not held centrally and could only be provided at disproportionate cost". (One department helpfully explains that they'd have to comb through all their records of individual access to the internet to find out, which is fair enough, but then say this is impractical because it's not held online. One wonders how they do store this data!) About a quarter of the departments, it seems, explain in their response that IP addresses pass through a central government system and so are effectively anonymised at the Wikipedia end. I'm not sure if the person writing the response for the others didn't know this, or just omitted it. The two best non-responses were from the Leader of the House, who sternly informed us that "Officials in this Office are not responsible for the creation of, or amendment to, Wikipedia entries and there are no plans for them to become so." [3] &, best of all... the Prime Minister himself, who denies everything: "I know of no instance where my Office has either created or amended any records on Wikipedia." [4] (Isn't seeing that sort of thing said by him a bit scary? Huh. How far we have come, and all that.) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk [1] - http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080317/text/80317w0018.htm#0803174004526 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080516/text/80516w0003.htm#08051640003189 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080403/text/80403w0014.htm#08040393002970 [2] - http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080421/text/80421w0101.htm#08042337002300 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080115/text/80115w0022.htm#0801165001061 [3] - http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080218/text/80218w0002.htm#08021824000117 [4] - http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080403/text/80403w0003.htm#08040376000376 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
