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Australian Politicians … editing Wikipedia and spending big on redundant Internet filters

(I’m back in Perth, and …) All over the world the WikiScanner has been uncovering interesting trails and tails of previously unnamed Wikipedia editors.  PerthNow quickly jumped on the bandwagon and discovered the the Office of Australia’s Prime Minister has been busy:

The Prime Minister’s staff has been editing Wikipedia to remove details that might be damaging to the Government in the lead-up to the election. Staff in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet have made 126 edits on subjects ranging from the children overboard affair to the Treasurer Peter Costello, Fairfax reports.

So, too, has Australia’s Department of Defense, although they’ve gone into Wiki lockdown while the Department figures out exactly who was changing what (or working out how to spin that story, at any rate).  The PM’s office have supposedly launched an internal inquiry, but I’m sure any interesting findings (whatever that might entail) won’t quite surface until the 07 elections are done, anyway!

At the same time, the long-awaited Federally-funded  NetAlert website, which is supposed to educate and arm parents, children and teachers to the dangers of life in a networked culture, has finally been released.  Sadly, though, the keystone of NetAlert are free family internet filters, which have been poorly received and for the most part, don’t appear to work.

PS Running WikiScanner past the University of Western Australia IP Address is far less exciting; there is one big Portishead fan, a few rants about masturbation, but that’s the juiciest we’ve got!

Update: Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer takes the cake with his thoughts on Wikipedia:

“My sort of recollection of Wikipedia sites is they are a bit, sort of, a bit anti-government, they are sort of a bit negative about people in the government,” Mr Downer said today. “That is my recollection of them, so maybe we should fire people up to edit them – but I know they have editorial control at Wikipedia so it probably wouldn’t help.”

It’s such a delight to have such informed politicians leading this country. *sigh*

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Searching Blogs Vs Wikis – Australians Prefer Wiki (The World Prefers Blog)

I was playing with Google Trends and their comparison function and noticed that you can now limit searches to regions (ie just Australia, for example). I was playing around looking at the comparative popularity of ‘blog’ versus ‘wiki’ and found something interesting: cumulatively, global searchers are still typing in ‘blog’ more, but in Australia, ‘wiki’ is a more popular term, and has been since the third quarter of 2006. Since there’s no scale on Google Trends, I’ve no numbers attached to these trends, but the results are interesting nevertheless.

Australia is looking for wikis

While the world is looking for blogs

[Click either image to expand.]

I’ve no idea why wikis are more popular in Australia … perhaps something to do with Wikipedia? I note in the News trends (the smaller bottom graph), blogs are still mentioned a lot more in the mainstream media. I wonder what it is about wikis and Aussies?

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