Sean Penn, OPM and Wikipedia
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, August 29, 2007 | 02:41 PM
By Tom Shoop | Wednesday, August 29, 2007 | 02:41 PM
The interest in just who's editing Wikipedia entries -- and especially, who at federal agencies might be doing so on government time -- is still running high. When Virgil Griffith, a California Institute of Technology graduate student, launched WikiScanner a couple of weeks ago, it suddenly became easy to track the names of organizations connected to the IP addresses of those who were making changes on the Wikipedia site. But the search function enabling users to find out exactly what they were adding or deleting was disabled due to high traffic on the site.
Well, apparently that problem has been solved, because FedSmith's Ralph Smith has been poking around and found some pretty interesting edits apparently originating from federal agencies. I won't give them away, except to say that I found it interesting that somebody at the Office of Personnel Management appears to be very interested in boosting the image of actor Sean Penn.
Comments
It's fine to block all access of government employees to things outside some firewall, but then I would not be able to do my official job, which includes obtaining data and editing it outside the firewall. So, instead of just stopping all internet activity of federal employees and putting a stop to things like tornado warnings, why not just prosecute or discipline wayward employees?
Another problem. I keep hearing of DOD people using gov purchase cards for personal travel and buying. This seems to be a recurring problem. In my agency, we do not have that problem. If someone were to do that, it would result in termination. We know that. Besides that, we are apparently more honest than that.
BB | Sunday, September 02, 2007 | 02:44 PMBut then we would not be able to post comments on stories like this, either, if IT restricted our access to websites.
Charleen | Friday, August 31, 2007 | 09:43 AMAll I ever hear is how overworked and underpaid our civil servants are, 1 has to ask who monitors the behavior. Better still why do they need access to Wikipedia. The IT community needs to do a better job of restricting government employees ability to go outside the firewall and stop this non-sense
dan ketter | Thursday, August 30, 2007 | 08:28 AMABOUT THIS BLOG
Government Executive Editor Tom Shoop takes a look at news and events affecting the federal bureaucracy, from the perspective of a longtime observer of government.
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