[LINK] Wikipedia editing by the Australian government

[Tom Worthington]

Channel 10 TV news interviewed me at 2pm as a representative of the 
ACS about the use of Wikipedia by the Australian government 
<http://news.google.com.au/news?hl=en&ned=au&ie=UTF-8&ncl=1119648059>.

Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited encyclopedia to which anyone 
can contribute <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial>. The 
Wikipedia does not require the use of real names by contributors 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username>, but records IP 
addresses. As the Wikipedia says: "An unregistered user is identified 
by his or her machine's IP address, which is used as their public 
identifier when making contributions (and signing comments on talk 
pages). Your computer's IP address can sometimes be used to find 
information about you, so registering increases your privacy by 
hiding it. " 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial_%28Registration%29>.

The WikiScanner by Virgil Griffith allows IP addresses to be looked 
up to easily see who edits what on the Wikipedia 
<http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/>.

As an example a quick search found 3819 edits of the Wikipedia by the 
Australian Department Of Defence IP range 203.10.220.0-224.255: 
<http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/name2ip.php?orgname=defence&location=australia&pagetitle=>.

Most of these edits seem relatively uncontroversial 
<http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/f.php?ip1=203.10.220.0-224.255>. Many 
are to correct spelling errors and details of military units and 
equipment. Some are to remove some details which should not be widely 
known for reasons of privacy and security. Others appear to be 
unrelated to the Defence Department and of general community 
interest. About the only issue would be if this was a good use of a 
government agency's computer and staff time.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml