Police Chief Demands His Staff Monitor His Wikipedia Entry

from the abuse-of-power? dept

Just as Slashdot is reporting about the mayor of Florence suing Wikipedia comes the news that a police chief in West Yorkshire, in the UK, is so upset with the edits to his own Wikipedia entry that he’s required his staff to monitor the page and make changes or revisions to it in response to critical comments left on the page. Now, obviously, having critical information about you on Wikipedia may not be pleasant, but aren’t there more important things for folks in a police department to be working on?

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Comments on “Police Chief Demands His Staff Monitor His Wikipedia Entry”

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24 Comments
yes says:

Re: no.

Perhaps the vain moron should have his staff working on other more pressing duties and serving the citizens rather than having them replace edits to his self-serving web page with approved text he wants others to see. This is a wikipedia entry, anyone can edit it so be prepared to have it happen. If you want a restricted edit page then you should host your own on a website you own and can ‘police’ accordingly.

As long as the staff is maintaining the truth – you forgot to add – he wants everyone to see then there is nothing wrong with this.

Seth Brundle says:

Re: no.

The problem with this is that he started to fight it publicly.

What he should have done is ignored it.

Now the whole world knows.

Since his staff playing whack-a-mole around the internet doing damage control is neither in their job description nor does it scale, it would have been better never to go down this road.

Yorkie says:

Ridiculous

What happens if he finds a disparaging YouTube clip? Would the staffers need to monitor YouTube as well? Forums, websites, blogs, all of these will of course have to be monitored to preserve this man’s image of competency. In fact I propose that he enlists the aid of the entire constabulary for this endeavor, since the internets are a big place after all. Cost should be no issue when the abiding public is footing the bil. In fact I recommend we raise taxes, because after all, can we truly put a price on a man’s self-image?

Woe be to the naysayers, the West Yorkies are watching you.

StarFleet Command says:

Re: Re:

—He wouldn’t be worried about what people say in his wiki entry, if he didn’t have something to hide.
Perhaps the root of this issue needs to be sorted out?—

“Hey Pot”, says Kettle, “looking a bit black today aren’t you?”

Your comment is ridiculous considering you are posting as AC.

Hard to Judge says:

I work in the IT field and at times work on things that a non-IT person may consider a waste of resources and time for the IT department. But to me it’s all related and you just wouldn’t understand.

Now, having said that to think that police would be taken off the street to secure some edits on a Wiki is ridiculous. I would make a more reasonable assumption that they would monitor this post on their downtime.

Anonymous Wombat (user link) says:

Missing the point folks?

You’re all missing the point when saying “Good For Him”

It’s a conflict of interest. It goes against policy in Wikipedia to have someone self-edit or a party of that person to edit for them as it decreases the neutrality of the article.

He’s focussing on presenting a padded biography instead of a factual one. While this may be acceptable on a personal website, it is not acceptable on wikipedia. It is alright to remove libel, slander and opinion from the article, however to replace that with opinion is just as bad as the vandalism that initially took place.

On top of that, the fact that he’s directed staff to maintain his version of the story, and not necessarily a true representation (as saved by the Wikipedia editors) is a gross misuse of resources on his part as well as a violation of wikipedias rules against conflict of interest.

He’s nothing but in the wrong in this case.

JustMe says:

Public funds used for personal business?

I can only assume that everyone posting in support of this daft position is a sock puppet for the police chief. For those of you who don’t see a problem would you be OK with a city employee baby sitting his children, cleaning his house, taking his relatives to the doctor? Hello, lab partner, it is THE SAME THING! You cannot use public funds for personal business. People go to jail for that kind of thing.

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