A person at Parliament is making too many ‘‘political'' alterations to New Zealand entries in the open-access Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, says media commentator Russell Brown, of Auckland.
Politicians and staffers ‘‘editing'' such entries should have to declare their interests rather than remaining anonymous behind the strings of numbers that make up Internet ‘‘addresses'' for individual users, Mr Brown said yesterday in his Hard News ‘‘blog''.
‘‘I think 202.22.18.241 is doing way too much, and behaving in too political a way, for someone hiding behind an IP address,'' he said. ‘‘I'd rather see Parliamentary editors register and declare interests in their profiles.''
Wikipedia records the exact time and IP address - the numerical identifier of each computer on the Internet - when any user alters a page.
The IP address used for the June 2007 alterations - to remove information about the deputy Opposition leader Bill English's moral beliefs and family - is assigned to the New Zealand Parliament, Mr Brown said.
He said, ‘‘whoever sits at 202.22.18.241 is Parliament's busiest Wikipedia editor. There are more than 500 edits logged against that IP address''.
After a new piece of software, Wiki-Scanner, was released last year, an Auckland blogger, Cameron Slater, who writes as ‘‘Whaleoil'', used it to track changes to the popular Internet encyclopedia being made on computers at Parliament.
‘‘202.22.18.241 is by far and away the busiest little beaver in Parliament on Wikipedia,'' said Mr Slater, who endorsed Mr Brown's call for transparency in the use of Parliamentary computers and staff to edit online encyclopedia.
Other editions of the encyclopedia on Parliamentary computers showed one, 202.22.18.1, displayed an interest in Christian politics, Nandor Tanczos, Maurice Williamson, Salient magazine, and Gerry Brownlee.
And 202.22.23.2 spent ‘‘an awful amount of time'' editing NZ Cabinet but also had an interest in autonomous building, Wilson Whineray, Hello Sailor, and fixed up typing errors on Australian constitutional law.
