14 DAY TRIAL // Wikipedia is again brought in the spotlights after the Australian government visited the official page of the Internet encyclopedia in order to edit some articles. According to the reports, the Australian Prime Minister's staff turned to Wikipedia and modified several entries such as 'Children Overboard Affair' or 'Mandatory Detention'. "Other edits included deleting the nickname of "Captain Smirk" from the Wikipedia biography of Australian Treasurer Peter Costello, and a range of bizarre edits, including the addition of the line "Poo bum dicky wee wee" to a Wikipedia article on Bubishi, a book related to Martial Arts," Duncan Riley from TechCrunch adds.
The edits were noticed by Wikiscanner, a special technology created to track the modifications of the Wikipedia articles, function that also discovered other changes coming from famous names. For example, a few weeks ago, Wikiscanner detected several edits made by the FBI and the CIA computers on numerous articles published on the virtual encyclopedia.
This case tends to cause a political dispute in Australia because the opposition leader Kevin Rudd accused the Prime Minister for encouraging people to edit Wikipedia's articles. "I notice the Prime Minister is engaging public servants to change Wikipedia," Mr Rudd said on Channel 7 according to News.com.au.
"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? On Wikipedia anything can appear. 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."
Wikipedia tends to become one of the top sources of information on the Internet and these reports are very useful for the encyclopedia as they drive traffic to the website and keep the products in the spotlights.