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Comment by JacobAldridge | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those cases where the changed Title on HN misleads [1]. These aren't changes from the 'government' they are changes from 'parliament and government offices'. Occams Razor would suggest they are more likely to be staffers and the occasional Patsy Cline-loving MP, rather than cabinet policies being enacted.

[1] Title as I write is "10 years of anonymous Wikipedia edits from the Norwegian government"

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That deliberately inflammatory wording also relies on the fact that some people hear “government” and immediately thinking of intelligence agencies or cynical political operators and ignore the fact that, particularly in well-reputed free countries like Norway with extremely low corruption rates, there are many government employees who feel a mandate for actual public service, and are doing non-trivial research & analysis, etc. to make sure that lawmakers and other parts of the government make the right decisions.

The kind of people you hire to do that sort of work are exactly the kind of people who are going to update Wikipedia when they see something wrong or incomplete — or possibly the person who might get a message if someone can't find the right info on Wikipedia.

The same thing is true for the vast majority of the Wikipedia edits attributed to the US Congress. Not only are most if not all of them written by staffers and other government employees who almost certainly not receiving any direction to make the edits, they're almost all innocuous spelling or grammar edits and a large portion of them aren't even on political pages.

I don't know if I'd attribute it to public service so much as boredom and personal hobbies, though. The headline, of course, is the same as in this case - that "the government" is making Wikipedia edits, with malicious implications - though there have at least been some cases of vandalism, probably by staffers.

public service might be too specific a term – it's really just a desire to share or correct something you know about. People on HN are used to thinking of e.g. http://xkcd.com/386/ as a tech geek thing but there are an awful lot of wonky types who feel that compulsion about other fields.

I'm sorry about that. That's on me. It was necessary to edit it to get below the 80 char limit for post titles.

All good - I suspected that was the reason.

I thought so as well. Most of the changes to the articles seem to be spelling corrections, and such.

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