Minister Carr and His Wikipedia Entry. (November 12, 2008)

It can be quite edifying what parliamentarians may utter when subjected to the heat of Senate Estimates.

The Australian's Higher Education Supplement reports in its "Snitch" column on the continuing undercurrent of the bowdlerizing of the Wikipedia entry on Senator Kim Carr, the federal Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.

According to Snitch: "Carr, a bastion of Labor's Victorian Left, was reportedly among the politicians whose Wikipedia entries had been quietly tidied up by self-effacing admirers with access to parliamentary computers. Slabs of personal details and an allegation of branch stacking were culled from the anybody-edits-encyclopaedia."

The particular section in Hansard reads as follows:

Now there's political censorship for you; no staff of Senator Carr's ministry can/may access Wikipedia through "departmental infrastructure."

BUT do they sneak off to the Internet café during coffee breaks to read Wiki entries and then saunter back memory key's hidden in their pockets so that they can make use of the information cached in Jimmy Wales' creation, or do they wait until they get back to their own digs and make sure they remove all traces of their surreptitious activities because when it comes to editing an entry:

What is of major consequence, however, is that the good Senator, rather than entering a studied rebuttal, allowed the material to be removed without issuing a protest in which he condemned the action.

____________________________

Note added 081113: 

It's been brought to TFW's attention that at the the end of the session (Hansard E-89) the following correction was made by Mr Paterson: