The annual Corruption Perception Index ranks nations "by their perceived levels of corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys" and every year the nordic nations inevitably come out on top. Why are we telling you this? Because, finally we have an interest in the Scandinavian desire for transparency.
Jari Bakken calls himself the lead developer of Norwegian parliamentary watchdog 'Holder De Ord'. And while we fully appreciate the necessity for a government watchdog, you would imagine that, a lot of the time, what he comes up with is hardly riveting stuff. Well think again.
Part of Mr. Bakken's work over the past couple of weeks has been to track down Wikipedia edits made from government IP addresses. Thankfully for us, he has included the Irish government in his findings. Between 2004 and 2010 the good folks of Leinster House and other government departments have made nearly 2,000 edits and a large amount those are concerned with sports pages.
As you'll see, some of those edits are of decidedly unparliamentary nature.
First up is this particularly succinct edit of Roy Keane's page at six o'clock on 14/12/2009. Unsurprisingly, the original entry is on the left, the edit is on the right
Next up, here's an edit of Keane's former Man Utd teammate Gary Neville from 20/01/2010. Given that this is from Neville's pre-punditry days, I think we can all agree that this waste of taxpayers time can be forgiven.
A year and a half after 'granny-gate', Stephen Ireland was the subject of some patriotic editing on 27/03/2009.
There was also some heroic cleaning up of some otherwise edited pages. This was deleted from James McCarthy's page on 10/10/2008.
Most recently, French tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga was on the receiving end of some well thought out critique on 28/01/2010.
Thanks for that Jari Bakken.
Cover image credit: David Maher / SPORTSFILE
