You have to love the discovery that members of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in our reactionary government have been using their office hours to contribute to Wikipedia, one of the greatest collective projects of our time. Sadly, the reptiles of the media seem to be insinuating that this is yet another example of public servants lying around like a bunch of hippos yawning at each other ear-deep in flowers and slime.

I reckon they have every right, and I am touched that our public service provides the opportunity. The Murdoch press provides a helpful discussion and a link to the whole list, but churlishly mocks these unknown servants of the state. I must admit that using “Poo bum dicky wee wee” as a test statement is probably not all that adult, and I prefer to imagine it coming from the computer of the assistant stationery stores keyholder rather than the head of the Department.

It is surely healthy that someone cares enough to make a “single-digit correction to a soccer scoreline in a monster entry about fans of Serbian football club Red Star Belgrade”.

I kind of like the fact that someone altered the statement that “Mandatory detention of asylum seekers was popular with the Australian electorate and helped [[John Howard]] win the 2001 federal election” to read “Mandatory detention of asylum seekers was popular with the Australian electorate. Some commentators argume that it helped [[John Howard]] win the 2001 federal election.” If this person did not have a job in the department, he or she may be completely unemployed, perhaps living under a bridge in a cardboard box. Certainly s/he does not have a huge grasp on logic, since it is odd to happily accept the notion that the policy was popular but still baulk at the notion it affected the subsequent poll. And who else objects to the statement?

Someone wanted to know about Androstenedione, a steroid – someone perhaps standing out from the other staff by virtue of vast thighs and a complete lack of neck. Clearly either a chemist or a devoted user, since (dare I say this is a man) he altered the molecular weight.

Very few of these entries refer to anything official – there’s a lot of attention to sport instead – and of these almost none do any more than add a bit of governmental information. They are also minor, and don’t suggest any more than a harrassed employee taking a break from weightier matters. It is not like hours of work had gone into giant wikiwars over the arcana of desperate defences of our refugee “policy”.

Interesting that

“Wikiscanner also identifies Department of Defence employees as the most prolific Wikipedia contributors in Australia. ..

….. Defence computers were found to have made more than 5000 edits to Wikipedia entries, including articles to the “9/11 truth movement”, the Australian Defence Force Academy and the Vietnam War-era Pentagon papers.”

And sad that officials said they would ban access to Wikipedia on Defence computers. After all, the site is very useful as a simple working tool with a hundred different uses.

I am not sure why the DoD would be so prominent; I am left to wonder if this is because a) it carries the largest number of people on the one IP address or b) it is the address for serving members of the armed forces in the field. A lot of that work is boring and isolated, with computers used at night. Presumably privately owned computers plugged into the network for recreational purposes in spare time carry the same IP. If all that is true, the story only tells us that bored members of the Australian armed forces have joined the great mass of people giving up their spare time to build Wikipedia.

Forcing them off it would be pretty trashy.

Obviously I don’t think this is much to whinge about. Indeed, I am relieved that the government is not doing what some private corporations are up to – the wholesale, systematic rewriting of entries, using superior time and persistence to wear down volunteers with a propensity for truth. That is really nasty.

(Carlton Ward Jnr, who took that hippo photo, is an interesting character, by the way.)

This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 1:54 am and is filed under Austrapolitics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.