On Fri, 24 Aug 2007 David Gerard wrote:

On 24/08/07, Robert Brockway robert@timetraveller.org wrote:

...

Morning. The Australian foreign minister, Mr Alexander Downer, has been quoted as stating that Wikipedia is "anti-government".

It's fairly clear he was floundering and didn't have a clue.

In my opinion the real problem is the question made by the journalist. It is not understandable and definitively incorrect. I would have replied saying that the question was not understandable, but politicians need to be more polite and diplomatic (although he said that there was some problems in the question, even if in a polite way.

I can not do anything else than agree with his point that if anybody could edit Wikipedia, than why reclaim if a person inside a governmental agency has done it.

Of course there is the problem of self-promotion, but this is a problem that can occur in any other fields.

There is then the problem if it is acceptable that people are paid with citizen money to edit on wikipedia (but this is a problem that is completely outside wikipedia).

I would not consider very serious his expression "a bit anti-government.". First of all we would need to understand what he means with this. Perhaps he is used that statements are written as written by government, and that somebody could change the government words is strange to him.

But one point he rose is rather interesting: "But I know they have editorial control"

While at the beginning of Wikipedia, if I have understood correctly, it was thought that the errors would be correct by the next editors, it was later created an organized system of checking. Could it be considered an editorial control, or at least an "internal" control? And how this relate to the thought at the beginning that everybody should be free to write?

AnyFile