Busted for Gundam Edits
By Christopher Nickson
October 08, 2007
The Japanese Agriculture Ministry has chastised workers who made Wikipedia edits during work hours, including one who made 260 changes on Gundam.
Japan’s Agriculture Ministry has been forced to disable access to Wikipedia after an internal investigation discovered that six of its employees had spent a large amount of time editing entries. The edits, all 408 of them, took place between 2003 and this year on company time.
Some had written about the WTO, one about mistakes he’d seen on billboards, but the one that really seemed to rankle was the employee who’d made a total of 260 additions or correction to articles on Gundam, the anime series about robots that’s designed for kids but also has a fan base among adults, who are called otaku nerds.
All six have been reprimanded, and ministry spokesman Tsutomu Shimomura told the Associated Press,
“The Agriculture Ministry is not in charge of Gundam.”
Of course, the Japanese workers are hardly the first to do Wiki editing on company time. A new tool has been developed to track people editing on the site, and among those making Wiki changes, often for political purposes, were employees of the CIA.