It doesn't surprise me. There is also a general issue of conflict of interest since a number of UK civil servants routinely update information about their departments on Wikipedia. I contacted UK Trade and Industry on behalf of Wikiproject spam about this a while back (I was an independent director of the DTI, then BERR at the time). See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UK_Trade_%26_Investment&action... Stating the reorganisation was one thing but there was lots of links and puff piece about how wonderful they were. Wikipedia is viewed as trendy and cool in most of the government with politicians being more cautious than professionals.

Boz

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 9:13 AM, Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:

"An individual wanted to learn details of the Chiefs of Defence Staff. He went to the authoritative source and sent a freedom of information request to the MOD. This week, the MOD responded by suggesting that Wikipedia is the most authoritative source of information on its staff..."

http://gizmonaut.net/blog/uk/2009/02/factcheck_n_sources.html

Gordo

-- "Think Feynman"///////// http://pobox.com/~gordo/ gordon.joly@pobox.com///

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