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| CURRENT SECTION :: Jobs | UK's most visited IT Contractor Site - 250k unique visitors March 2008 |
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Buffy the Vampire Slayer, DJ Shadow and a 1970s novel about car-crash sex fetishism – hardly ideal bedfellows but nonetheless, the subjects on the minds of civil servants. In fact, Whitehall’s men and women have spent time visiting Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, to set the record straight on these three cultural icons. They made more than one amendment to details of the US TV series, added to the disc jockey’s latest release list and “revised for clarity” the entry of JG Ballard’s 'Crash.' Staff at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) also found fault with the site’s write-up of Adam Sky, aka Adamski, a DJ prominent in London at the time of acid house. Critics are asking how these online activities, revealed in a written parliamentary answer, represent the work of public servants on tax-payer funded time, using tax-payer funded computers. Stephen O’Brien, shadow health minister, who tabled the question, also called on ministers to account for the waste of taxpayers’ money that surfing Wikipedia has accumulated. But he told the Sunday Telegraph that the Treasury and No 10 have refused to reveal their time and contributions on the site, which was amended 103 times by the DCMS. Although an unnamed insider told the paper that the online revelations were “galling” for their department’s reputation, other parts of central government emerged as even more prolific users of the reference site. The Ministry of Defence amended 5614 entries; a further 1500 were edited by the Department of Health, while just 25 were changed by Her Majesty’s Government Communications Centre. The Department of Work and Pensions, which refused to come clean, said it “does not have a policy of regularly monitoring updates made to Wikipedia from DWP IP addresses.” “Therefore the Department would not as a matter of course determine Wikipedia entries that have been created or amended. “The cost of obtaining and analysing such data could be obtained only at disproportionate cost,” the DwP added, responding to Mr O’brien. In August last year, Wikipedia blocked the DoH’s IP address for creating or amending entries, suggesting staff have set up their own user accounts to continue using the site from departmental computers. Mar 31, 2008 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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