Governments behave questionably on Wikipedia. Media pretends to be shocked.

Wikiscanner has been fun, hasn't it? For those who have come in late, Wikiscanner traces the IP addresses of edits to Wikipedia back to home organisations. It's a simple idea really, and it has been marvelous in its execution. All manner of dodgy edits from corporations have floated to the surface (see this collection from Wired for a start) and perhaps least surprisingly, governments have been in the thick of making changes, too.

Australia isn't coming out of this cleanly with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Department of Defence copping some unwanted attention due to the editing activities of its staff. While the SMH article does indicate that most edits were legitimate ones, that still means that some weren't including (according to this Techcrunch article) some hot political issues locally like the Children Overboard affair and mandatory detention.

The biggest surprise about this story? That anyone is surprised at all. Governments do some apparently shifty things some times. More often, individuals with a particular issue to grind will do even shiftier things. Individuals work in Government departments that may or may not do shifty things. Is this news? Yes. Is this a scandal? Not really. Anyone using Wikipedia as a definitive resource will get what's coming to them anyway.

Move along people, there's very little to see here. Some people got caught out while other legitimate Wikipedia users will suffer as access to the resource is restricted. I think the big lesson out of all of this is that anonymity online is something of a myth unless you go to great efforts that are probably disproportionate to what you are trying to achieve anyway.

I think there's something in that for all of us.